


Bite Night

by samwise



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Gen, M/M, Unrequited Love, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 51,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samwise/pseuds/samwise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You'd be loath to call it an apocalypse, but zombies have certainly infected England, and brains don't count for anything except gourmet corpse food anymore.  Written (late!) for Halloween 2012 as my NaNoWriMo project, and will be updated as I finish parts.  Shippy bits are just starting to appear now, and it also contains mention of Mystrade, which are small enough to be ignorable if you don't ship that.  Enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 25th October, 2012

The first officially recorded case was on the 25th of October 2012, and of course Sherlock Holmes had to be among the first to take a look at the body.

He walked into the mortuary without a mask.  It was a deliberate choice, and probably mostly made to aggravate John; he’d been stressing the importance of not coming into contact with the cadavers all day, and apparently Sherlock found it pretty amusing.

“It seems perfectly inanimate to me,” he said, reaching down to trace his fingertips over the surface of the man’s skin.  He didn’t look at John, but he didn’t have to.  There was nobody else he could possibly be smirking at, after all.  Not even Sherlock tried to irritate dead bodies.  “No groaning.  No attempts to… say, devour my brains.”

“Shut up, please,” John said from behind the mask, eyes fixed on that bare hand.  Couldn’t he just have worn gloves?  “It’s been killed anyway.”

“Ah; decapitation,” said Sherlock, as though it were a trifling thing that he’d missed.  Of course, it was most likely neither.

John threw him a look.  “Yes,” he said tersely.  “Everything that’s ever been written about them says that - that they can die if you can damage the brain, or just remove the head.”

“You are of course aware that _Dawn of the Dead_ doesn’t count as scientific research.”

John was fairly proud of his own self-restraint as he responded.  “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“Good.”  Sherlock turned his attention back to the body, but only spent a few moments before speaking up again.  “Without your personal brand of horror bias,” he said, “would you tell me what you think?”

“I think you’re a git,” John said, but he took a step closer to lean over the trolley.  “Alright.  Dead three to five days.  Head was removed… ah, yesterday, judging by the wound.  And in the mouth…” He reached to open it, thankful for his gloves.  “Residue between the teeth.  Flesh.  Some fur.  I’d say some of it has been there three or four days, but some is fresher.  And there are the blood-stains, of course.”

“Diagnosis?”

He shot him a look.  “You know my diagnosis.”

“I mean your _real_ diagnosis.”

“That _is_ my real diagnosis,” he said, struggling to be patient now.  “There’s nothing else that explains everything.  It just makes sense.”

“It doesn’t make any sense at all.” Sherlock paced away from him, going to snatch up the access and arrival records from the desk.  “You can’t possibly believe all that rubbish.”

“I do, in fact.”

“You’re a medical doctor!” Sherlock protested.  “You’re a so-called educated man!”

“And there’s evidence.”  He could feel his voice getting a little hot now.  _No, John.  Calm down_.  “There is evidence and there are witness accounts, and there is no reason not to believe in it.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Sherlock said, wafting a hand to dismiss him, eyes fixed on the paper in his hands now.  “There is no evidence, because it isn’t true.  This corpse was kept and decapitated post-death – and _without_ being reanimated – by an idiot trying to make the headlines the week before Halloween.  Presumably it’s roadkill or the like ground into the teeth.  I don’t need to see any more, and neither should you.”

The protracted, deliberate silence that dominated their taxi ride home and the rest of their evening at the flat would probably be considered an argument by ordinary friends, but Sherlock and John were not ordinary at all.  When John walked into the kitchen for his cup of coffee the next morning things were perfectly alright again, in fact.  The only sign there’d ever been an argument at all was that the newspaper John had brought home yesterday had been put in the rubbish bin on his behalf, presumably because of its front-page headline.

 _Zombie Panic Strikes London_ , it said.

He could only pray that Sherlock was right.  _Oh, please, God, let him be right._


	2. 28th October, 2012

Three days later, there were two more bodies.  The first was an ordinary woman, dead from a wound on her neck – well.  More like a _gaping bloody hole_ in her neck, if you asked John.  She had a chunk of flesh missing, and scraps of it hanging off as if clinging to the body they were once part of.

The second was still moving.

John’s brow was set in a light frown as he joined the Holmes brothers in the observation room, watching the thing thrash under its bonds and feeling safe but disturbed behind the glass.  He could have rubbed in that he was right, of course, but when Sherlock was wrong he beat himself up about it quite enough to be satisfying, thanks very much.  Besides, John was above that kind of childish behaviour. Most of the time, anyway.

“I was just telling Sherlock that we haven’t been able to get close for long enough to see if it is, in fact, dead,” Mycroft said, his voice the same plain drawl as it usually was.  Trust him not to be at all affected by coming up face-to-face with _this_.  “But from a distance, it does appear to be.”

“Shoot it and see if it dies.”

“Yes, well… that would be something of a problem if it turned out to be a student playing some kind of intensely prolonged prank, wouldn’t it?”

Sherlock grimaced.  “One less idiot graduating with a 2:2 in Film Studies, then.”

“And a PR nightmare.”

“Happy Halloween,” John contributed, but found himself largely ignored.

“I suspect we’re just going to have to wait,” Mycroft said, lip curling.  God forbid a Holmes should have to wait for anything.  “If it’s a joke, there’s only so long it can go on for before they lose energy.”

They fell silent again.  John couldn’t say what the other two were thinking, but there was only one thing running through his mind.  If that was an actor flailing around beneath those restraints, then he was doing a hell of a job of it.

“I don’t suppose you’ll let me in there,” Sherlock tried.

Mycroft threw him a look.  “And how do you suppose that would turn out if it _was_ a-”

“It _isn’t_ ,” he interrupted.  “It’s-”

Fortunately, however, Sherlock never got to divulge what he thought it was, as a frantic-looking doctor burst in with her mask pulled down.

“Mr. Holmes.  The deceased subject has gone missing, sir.”

Nobody was under any illusions about which of the Holmes brothers this was addressed to, but Sherlock cut in anyway.  “Then it has to be a prank,” he said.  “She simply got up and left.”

The doctor shook her head.  “She was declared dead.”

“It’s perfectly possible to imitate a corpse – even to medical standards.”

“No, Sherlock,” John said, quiet as the full realisation of what this all meant sank down on him.  Believing and knowing were very different things.  “I examined her myself.”

This wasn’t to say he thought he was some kind of superior doctor, of course, but he knew Sherlock would be likelier to trust the judgement coming from him.  Sure enough, Sherlock dropped that train of thought and branched off to another.  “The body was moved, then.  Stranger things have happened in mortuaries, particularly in heightened situations.”

“No,” the doctor started, but he was already heading for the door.

“It’s on a gurney in another examination theatre, and if you only _look_ then you’ll find it.”

“Sherlock,” John started, but he knew there was no stopping him now.  He could only follow him, walking quickly to try and catch up.  Mycroft and the doctor followed close behind, by the sounds of things, but John didn’t look back to check.  They weren’t as much of a concern.

“It’s ridiculous to be frightened over something like this,” he insisted.  He pushed into each room in turn with a hefty shove before looking in briefly to check it, and then came straight back out again.  _Next_.  “It doesn’t achieve anything; just panic and wasted oxygen.”

“Go _easy_ ,” pressed John, concerned about the amount of noise he was making.  If anything was making people panic, it was the madman tearing through the corridors and banging open doors.  “Easy, Sherlock.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Then calm down.”

Evidently Sherlock had to concede this was a fair point, as he did pause briefly before pushing open the next door with a little less force.  Well, good; at least he wasn’t beyond being reasoned with.

“I think we ought to consider a plan of action if the body is _not_ on the gurney,” Mycroft suggested from a few feet behind.  It was unusually tentative for him, John thought – and then suddenly he understood.  He didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of his younger brother, and undoubtedly admitting that he might believe in ‘all that tabloid rubbish’ was a sure-fire way of doing that.  Even so, he felt he had to have something planned out; even so, the politician in him needed to be ready.  He needed to be _instructed_ , even.

If Sherlock detected all of this, it only amused him more.  He snorted quietly, not sparing his sibling a look as he pushed open another door.  “You surprise me, Mycroft.  You were never this much of a teenager even when you actually _were_ one.”

“Preparation is key,” Mycroft said in his defence, but there was never a chance for Sherlock to retort.

“Oh, my God,” said John under his breath, looking over Sherlock’s shoulder into the room he had just entered – and God was the only person he believed could be guaranteed to help them now, because there at the far end of the room, gorging herself on what appeared to be a lung prepared for dissection, was the dead girl he’d examined earlier.

Walking.  Moving.  _Alive_.

“Sherlock,” John said quietly, already backing away and touching his hand to Sherlock’s elbow to try and bring him along.  “Shut the door.”

“It isn’t _real_ ,” Sherlock said, insistent to the last and stupid – _infuriating_ – as he took a step further into the room.  His voice stirred the unusual diner and she twitched, not quite yet encouraged to look up from her meal but certainly interested.  “It’s an actor.  If not that, then somebody suffering an intense delusion.”

They’d already discussed that it couldn’t be an actor, and for the same reason the delusion explanation didn’t work either, but John was in no mood for the debate.

“Sherlock,” he said, harder now if not louder.  “Keep your voice down.  Come back here.  Shut the door.”

“Sherlock,” Mycroft added uselessly, his tone a clear warning.

He didn’t listen to either of them.  “It isn’t real,” he repeated.  “It doesn’t make sense.  Bodies die.  They don’t come back to life.  There isn’t an explanation for it.  It isn’t _possible_.”

“Alright,” John said, “but get back here and close the _fucking_ door and you can tell us how wrong we are out here.”

She – no, _it_ – turned to look at him now.  Like the one they had strapped down, its expression was one of natural anger, perhaps thanks to the wild, reddened eyes that were the only really _alive_ thing about its face.  Its mouth hung open, smeared with blood and strings of the torn organ it had just been biting into.  Clearly, though, live meat was preferable; its jaw started working as it set its eyes more firmly on Sherlock, chewing on nothing, and moments later the legs followed.

It was fast.  John hadn’t expected it to be so fast.

Sherlock tried to defend himself, of course.  He was quick too, and clever in a fight – but strategy worked best against a human, and it was a wild animal that he was dealing with here.  The struggle was so quick that John hadn’t even reached him before it clamped down onto his neck, its own still wet and shiny with lost blood, and bit into him _hard_.

John didn’t think.  Of course, this wasn’t the first time that he’d been this quick to protect Sherlock, but usually it was with something moderately _clean_ – a gun, or his fists.  Today he picked up the first bit of hand-sized diagnostic equipment he set eyes on and smashed it into the side of the creature’s head, over and over and over until the sounds all blended into one another and globs of dirty blood were coating one half of his face, thick and lukewarm and stinking of iron, and the body of the _thing_ lay crumpled and inactive on the floor.

He would have carried on, too, if the adrenalin rush hadn’t stumbled and forced him to drop the machine and lean, nauseous and weak, against the gurney that Sherlock was crumpled on. He was disturbingly still.

Mycroft’s hands were already pressed gently around the wound on his neck, which was thankfully much cleaner than the other bite they’d seen tonight.  Even so, Sherlock’s breath was already shallow, and it didn’t take any medical knowledge to see that he’d fallen unconscious.  “A doctor, _now_ ,” Mycroft barked. John might have been offended that he didn't count if he wasn’t so utterly sure he’d be useless right now.

He heard something about an official state of emergency, but it washed over him.

The face of the dead girl, no longer angry, looked up at him amidst the mess of her own head.  As the sickness rose and he carried on staring, he thought he saw her lips move.

“She – it bit him,” he said, finally tearing away.

Mycroft was a few feet away by now, looking down at the floor and presumably thinking, but he looked up as he heard.  Apparently this was the only communication he could manage, however, as he just met John’s eyes and failed to find the words, if he was even looking for them at all.

“It bit him,” John repeated, and there was nothing else to say.


	3. 29th October, 2012

They waited, because it was all they could do.

It was only a matter of time, they supposed, before Sherlock gave up and became one of them.  It had gone past midnight now, but he was still in the same state.  John thought he’d had a conversation with Mycroft about whether or not they ought to decapitate the body after he died, just in case, but neither of them had actually said so explicitly.  It could just as easily have been about anything else.

His coffee had gone cold again.  John sighed, heading over to the sink to tip it out.  His stomach wasn’t settled enough to drink it hot, so he sure as hell knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it down cold.

It had been nearly an hour since Mycroft had gone in, which meant it was his turn soon.  _Christ_.  He was a terrible friend, he thought.  A good friend wouldn’t be reluctant to take their turn at his bedside.

He couldn’t watch him die again, though.  Especially not like this.

 _I need him not to die_ , he thought.  _He doesn’t deserve to go like this, God, please; just let him somehow live_ , and it had been a hell of a long time since John had actually honest-to-goodness prayed, but now seemed as good a time as any to start up again.  He imagined Sherlock would tell him that faith was the refuge of the desperate – a psychological safety net that stopped you from feeling entirely helpless at any given time.  The placebo effect, almost.

John wasn’t sure if he really believed in God anymore, but he’d take the comfort anyway.

 _Do this for me – this one thing – and I’ll go to church again; I’ll pray every night, I swear I will_ …

Of course, all this was assuming that the entire country wouldn’t be lost to the virus or bacteria or whatever on earth it was.  Sherlock hated the word, but finally John permitted himself to use it. _Zombie_ , he thought.  It was the fucking zombie apocalypse, and they needed Sherlock Holmes around to contain it.  He was cleverer than a disease, though John supposed they were in the same boat at the moment – fighting for survival, and draining every nearby resource in an attempt to cling on.

John paced in front of the room.  He’d forgotten what Sherlock looked like in the bed, attached to the drip and even paler than usual in the harsh hospital lighting.  It was a sickening mental image, of course.  If he closed his eyes he knew it’d be all he saw – Sherlock in the stark white; Sherlock on the pavement with a backdrop of blood; Sherlock ambling towards him, emptied and angry and dead.

Even so, he had to know.  He had to be able to picture it.  It might be the last time he saw him alive, and it was at least a calmer image than the one of the attack itself.

He sat down again, but only for a second as he heard Mycroft’s footsteps approaching the door and stood to meet them.

“No change,” Mycroft reported lightly.

“I know.”

“I’ll be outside.  I have my phone.”

There was nothing else to say, so John merely looked down at the floor and headed into the room Mycroft had just left.  As he’d just seen from the door, Sherlock hadn’t even moved since they’d laid him down there.

It didn’t inspire much hope.

He took the seat beside the bed, which was unpleasantly warm from where Mycroft had been sitting in it.  He took a few moments to try and get comfortable before realising that it wasn’t going to happen, and simply settled for leaning forward a little to be closer to his friend.

“Wake up,” he tried, feeling stupid.

As he had been for the past few hours, Sherlock did respond slightly to the sound.  Every time his eyelids twitched like that John had been expecting them to open.  Needless to say, they never had.  Talking to him, then, was something like torturing himself, but he carried on with it anyway.  He couldn’t just sit there in silence.  Much like the prayer, talking at least felt like it was doing something.

Some doctor he was, if he couldn’t even help his friend now.

“You’re going to have to tell me what to do with the bacteria samples.  You’ll be furious if the results get skewed because you’re in here, not…” He lost the words for a few moments and floundered, taking longer than he’d like to get them back.  Well, he hadn’t slept.  “Not working with them.  And we wouldn’t want that.”

Sherlock, of course, said nothing.

“I could bring you a cigarette.”

The machine tracking Sherlock’s heartbeat caught his attention.  That, at least, was steady – a little too fast, but nothing to really worry about yet.  His temperature was up, too, despite his paleness.  If he were conscious and talking, John would diagnose a fever.  As things stood, of course, it was a little more serious than that.

He tried to ignore the steady beeping, but it wasn’t easy.

“You’ve got an hour, by the way, before it’s Mycroft’s turn again.  And he doesn’t seem to mind, obviously, but I know how much you hate spending time alone with your brother, so… if you just…”

Beep.  Beep.  Beep.

“I’ll be quiet.”

He wished the machine would make a similar promise, but then realised that wasn’t a good thing to wish for at all.  _Didn’t mean that one_ , he added deliberately, for any higher power caring to listen.  _Ignore that_.

Fifteen minutes later, he forgot it had ever happened, because Sherlock moved.  No – that wasn’t right.  He _writhed_.  He gripped the blankets tight in his white-knuckled fists, curling and uncurling his body slowly as if in terrible pain.

John put his hand over one of Sherlock’s fists without really thinking.  It was scary not really knowing whether this was better or worse; of course, just in case it was the latter, he reached to press the call button.  He may be a doctor, but he wasn’t thinking like one now.  He was thinking like a friend.

‘He’s moving,’ he texted to Mycroft as an afterthought, thinking that he’d be pretty peeved if the same had happened when he’d gone for coffee, and the first he knew of it was when he came back inside.

He’d only just finished texting when he heard an awful groan of pain, which led his eyes to his friend in time to see him open his eyes.

They weren’t vacant.  Far from it, in fact.  Sherlock was very much alive.

“Alright, alright,” John said softly, reaching to squeeze his fist gently again.  “It’s alright.  I’m here.  The doctors are coming.”

“Bloody _pain_ ,” he said.  It must be bad, John thought – it was very rare that Sherlock cursed, however mildly.

“I know,” he assured him, though he really didn’t know at all.  “I know, Sherlock.  It’s alright.  Lie back.”

He groaned again, for once doing as he was told without question, and closed his eyes again to lie in rest for a few moments.  It only took him a couple of seconds for him to remember to ask.  “Did you get her?”

“It’s dead.  Gone.”

“Good.”  He paused for a moment before adding, “Why aren’t I?”

John thought for a moment, trying to work his way round being entirely honest, and then gave up.  “I don’t know,” he admitted, voice quiet.

“Perhaps not out of the woods yet, then.”

“Don’t say that.”

“We don’t know how she died,” Sherlock insisted, already seeming a little more awake, though he didn’t try to sit up yet.  John was glad of that.  He didn’t fancy trying to order him to lie back down if he was already capable of disagreeing again.  “The same could have happened to her.  She could have seemed fine before she turned.  Perhaps it’s how it happens.”

“A few hours ago you didn’t believe in it.”

“Some people can ignore evidence when it bites them in the backside,” Sherlock said, closing his eyes.  Maybe he was thinking.  John hoped not; it was better that he didn’t tire himself out.  “I am not one of them.”

“Bites them in the neck, as it were.”

“Shut up, please,” he said, though it wasn’t real irritation.  “Have you been sitting there the entire time?”

“Took shifts with Mycroft.”

Sherlock pulled a face, but he didn’t have time to say anything.  The doctors came in before he had time to think of it, and Mycroft followed closely behind.  He took a moment to realise that Sherlock was actually _conscious_ before throwing John a disparaging look.

“‘Moving’, John?  Not ‘awake’?”

“He _was_ moving,” John protested.  “Awake came after.”

“You might have updated me.”

“He was busy,” Sherlock said.  It was slightly comforting to see that he was well enough to act like himself – siding with John over his older brother.  He peered over at him, shifting to allow the two doctors access to him.  “Unlike you.”

“I could have drafted the emergency announcement myself,” he said, “but instead I stayed here with you.”

“Not very practical.”

“Family isn’t,” Mycroft pointed out, and maybe Sherlock wasn’t quite himself yet after all, as he let the point drop.

Really, though, John was more concerned with Sherlock’s well-being than this tiff, so he turned towards the doctors to speak to them instead.  “He’s alright?”

“Seems to be,” said one of them, only half-listening.  John didn’t mind that much – at least he was paying Sherlock a good amount of attention.  “Vitals are fine.  Symptoms of fever, but otherwise well.  We can’t be sure with a case like this, but I’d say he’s clear.”  He paused, perhaps remembering what he’d been told about dealing with Sherlock Holmes.  “Though of course we’ll need to keep him here overnight.  Locked in.”

“Tedious,” said Sherlock, but without much gusto.

“We’d like to run some blood tests.”

John nodded, folding his arms.  “Compare it to the, ah… corpse blood?”

“Already running that one, yes.  We’re not sure how accurate it’ll be, but we’re at least hoping to see what causes it.  It could still be in his blood.”

“The board are more concerned about why he hasn’t died,” said the other doctor.  John almost condemned him for his word choice, but supposed that none of them had really gotten enough sleep tonight.  “Her wound wasn’t fatal either, but it killed her anyway.  It's been suggested that it’s a bacteria – something his antibodies managed to fight off, but hers didn't.”

“To confirm… is he going to die?” Mycroft interrupted to ask, composed enough again to speak as if it were the most mundane question in the world.

“No,” John said, at exactly the same time as Sherlock said, “Eventually, yes.”

The senior doctor waited a moment to let them finish before responding, with a very respectable amount of patience, “We sincerely doubt it.”

“Alright.  Then if there’s nothing else for you to do until you take the blood samples…”

Sometimes John forgot how intimidating Mycroft was to other people, and it surprised him now as the doctors left the room with only an obedient nod in response to his elongated silence.  Well, there was a trick and a half.

“I suppose you want to make some sort of plan of action,” Sherlock said.  “Even you wouldn’t clear a room just for the sake of it.”

“I haven’t cleared the room yet.”

He looked pointedly at John, who took a moment to catch on before he shook his head.  “Oh, no.  I’m not going anywhere.”

Mycroft gave him a look.  “I was rather hoping you’d go and observe our captive friend to start to form some more, ah… _firm_ medical ideas about him and his kind.”

“I’d rather he stayed here,” Sherlock said, “so you ought to save yourself the time and start talking.”

There was a moment of tension, and then Mycroft gave up.  It was clear that anything Sherlock heard would eventually be relayed to John in any case, so it wasn’t really a battle worth fighting.  He realised that, apparently – though he turned away from John to speak.  Whether this was subconscious or deliberate, John didn’t like to say.

“There are undoubtedly others walking around the city, if not the rest of Britain.  Yet more, I suppose, waiting to reanimate.  I will need the majority of the police and some of the armed forces to maintain public order and line the streets for the sake of safety.  As such, if there is a source, then I would like you to find it.”

“You have people for that,” Sherlock said, “and I’m incapacitated.”  This second reason was, of course, delivered with a note of bitterness.

“Yes,” Mycroft said, “and I’d much rather risk _people_ than my brother, but I can trust you and John not to be rattled - not to speak to the press.  This is something that requires the fastest fix possible.”

“Then you’ll arrange for me to skip bed-rest.”

“No, not in the least,” he corrected casually.  “You will stay overnight and give blood as the doctors have asked.  Then, if John permits it, you may go.”

“If _I_ permit it?” John asked.  He seemed to have taken the words out of Sherlock’s mouth, too.

Mycroft turned to explain it to him with a note of irritation.  John supposed this was one of those things that was supposed to be obvious, but evidently it wasn’t if even Sherlock hadn’t picked up on it.  “You are in the unique position of understanding medicine, having a grasp of our… predicament… and _caring_ about Sherlock.  You can weigh up the matter best.”

This seemed like an awful lot of responsibility, but John had been a doctor for many years, and an army doctor for a good portion of those.  He didn’t shy away from that.  “Alright.”

“Caring,” Sherlock said bluntly.  “You’re asking him to decide because he _cares_.”

“Evidently sometimes it is an advantage, after all,” Mycroft said.  “In very specific circumstances, that is.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”  They looked at one another carefully for a few moments, almost seeming to forget John was there before Sherlock finally turned to him again.  “Go and observe the subject.”

“What?  Why?”

It became clear after a few moments that he wasn’t going to get an answer, though.  Sherlock had already turned back to look at Mycroft again, in that intense unblinking way of his, and he was a lost cause when he got like that.  He sighed, climbing tiredly to his feet.

“Fine.  Fine.  I’m going.  Have your secret whisper club.”

Honestly, though, it was quite a relief to be away.  He spent a minute just standing outside in the cold to gather himself, reminding himself that he was awake and that things were going to be okay, because Sherlock was somehow bloody well _alive_.

The git. 


	4. Later on the 29th October, 2012

If John was going to be thrown out of the hospital room, then he was at least going to do something useful.  As Mycroft had suggested, this manifested itself in the form of going to observe the one live – or rather, _not_ live – zombie they had in captivity to see what he could learn from it at a distance.  Of course, the ‘distance’ part was key.  Sherlock had wanted to get behind the glass the last time they’d been here, but that seemed like even more of a bad idea this time round.

John still hadn’t quite accepted that Sherlock was going to be alright, though.  That would take time – maybe falling asleep and waking up to see he was _still_ alright, too.

For now, all he could do was keep working.  The doctors would be working just as hard, and then maybe the blood tests would give them some much-needed answers.

He pushed open the door to the observation room, wincing as he realised he’d shoved it too hard.  It banged against the doorframe – not too badly, of course, as he hadn’t _slammed_ the thing, but loud enough to make the zombie look up in his direction.  It couldn’t see through the one-way glass, of course, but as it stared vacantly in his direction John almost felt that it could.

He wasn’t afraid to admit that the whole thing gave him the creeps.  You’d probably be stupid not to be frightened by it.  Either that or a Holmes brother.

All the same, he kept walking towards the glass, reminding himself of the zombie's stupidity and the nature of the glass.  It was an animal, essentially – of course it would look in the direction of a noise even if it couldn’t see anything there.  It was like trying to get a dog to look the way you were pointing instead of at your finger; the creature didn’t recognise what the thing _meant_.  It only knew that it was there, so it looked.

It just happened that this look was slightly more unsettling than a dog’s.  By ‘slightly’, of course, he meant ‘a lot’.

“You’re quite something, aren’t you?” he muttered under his breath.  At least having it stare fixedly in one direction meant that it wasn’t thrashing around madly.  Now he could get a decent look at it.  Like the female, it had a gory wound on its neck, but this one was over the throat instead of at the side.  It must have been a fairly nasty way for the person to go, but John could barely think about them once having been human anymore.  There was nothing familiar at all in its slow, empty movements and its gaping, hungry jaw – nothing except a vague connection to old horror movies, of course, which didn’t help.

Beyond the wound, though, there wasn’t really much to judge it by.  He wasn’t close enough to examine the body properly, and that was that.  Besides, he’d already looked at the corpse of the female before it had reanimated, and he didn’t suppose there’d be much of an anatomical difference between the two.  Becoming a zombie didn’t much affect your body in the movies, he supposed.  Perhaps it was just the brain.

Eventually the zombie gave up on listening out for the noise and started thrashing again.  John noted with glumness that if they were to be compared to anything in horror’s back catalogue of the undead, it would not be the slow, ambling Romero kind.  These were fast movers – more like predators than ex-corpses.

It was bloody typical, of course, that it should be the more dangerous option that they had to contend with.  At least average citizens could have outrun the Romero type.  They didn’t stand a chance with this lot without some way to defend themselves.

It occurred to him suddenly that the loss of life was going to be high whatever happened.  Something had transformed this one just as it had transformed the one victim they had hold of.  Not only that, but there was this zombie itself to think about.  How many other victims had it killed before the woman?  How many of _them_ were currently walking around hurting more people?

He decided he had to go outside and get some air, leaning against the wall to drag as much air as he could in and out, like a shower for his lungs. Get it out.

Sherlock took the opportunity to text. ‘Anything?’

‘No.  Not close enough.  Don’t think there are any physical differences between them and us.  Just in the brain, maybe.’

‘Go back to 221B and get some rest.’

‘Staying here.’

‘Update Mrs. Hudson and make sure she stays inside.’

Git.  He knew John couldn’t refuse that.  Why it should be such a bad thing that he stay in the hospital with Sherlock overnight he didn’t know, but it seemed his mind was made up, and really John supposed he could do with a good night’s sleep, so he relented.  Time to go home.  He could only hope that there would still be a recognisable country for him to wake up to in the morning.


	5. 30th October, 2012

Sherlock was still alive in the morning.  John knew this because he’d sent a text.

‘Not dead.  Come now, or when awake.’

Then, twenty minutes later: ‘Come now.  Wake up.’

It was typical of Sherlock, of course, but that was almost the best part.  He planned on keeping that particular thought to himself, though.  His friend hardly needed his ego inflating any further, after all.

Mrs. Hudson was already awake and worrying when he got to the kitchen.  He’d slept in late, so this wasn’t particularly surprising, but she did seem to have bags of worry under her eyes as though she hadn’t had more than a few snatched minutes of sleep herself.

“Morning, Mrs. Hudson,” he said, gently patting her shoulder as he walked past to the kettle.  “I’ll make us some tea, shall I?”

“I do worry about you boys.”

He flicked the kettle on and pulled down two mugs, popping a teabag in each ready for the hot water.  “He’s going to be fine.  He sent me a text this morning.”

“It won’t be the last you’re involved with the whole mess, though.  Both of you.”

John disagree with that, so he didn’t say anything at all on the subject – just waited for the kettle to click, and tried half-responding to see if she’d notice.  “So long as you stay inside you’ll be absolutely fine.  I’m sure it’s just a small-scale problem.  Sorted in a few days.”

“Just you make sure you look after yourselves.”

Well, he could hardly ignore that one.  He looked back at her and sighed quietly, noting her slightly shaking clasped hands and gaze fixed firmly on the table.  “You know you don’t have to worry about us.  We’ll be careful.”

“Careful might not be good enough for something like this,” she said.  “I know what they’re like, these things.  Horror stories weren’t invented in the 21st century, you know.”

He felt a little guilty at that.  Though both he and Sherlock always made sure not to underestimate Mrs. Hudson, sometimes they tried it on with her a little.  She was too clever to deceive too much, though – even for her own comfort, which was what he was aiming for this time.  “Mycroft asked us to help.  The police and the army are going to have their hands full.”

“It’d be the first time Sherlock did anything just for Mycroft alone.”

“It’s for everyone,” he pointed out.  “If we can find what started it then maybe we’ll stand a chance of wiping it out early before it’s uncontrollable.”

“I still don’t like it.”

He paused to pour the hot water into the mugs, topping each one off with milk to carry them back to the table.  He placed hers in front of her politely, but she didn’t seem to want to touch it.  Honestly, John couldn’t really blame her.

“I agree,” he said quietly.  “It’s a mess.  I’d rather not be involved.  I’d certainly rather he wasn’t, but I’ll try not to let him do anything stupid.”

“There’s no stopping him sometimes.”

“I’ll just have to put my foot down, then, won’t I?”

She at least smiled at that, though it occurred to him that it wasn’t particularly encouraging that the thought of him trying to control Sherlock was actually funny.  Hopefully he’d be able to hold the fact that he’d known it was a zombie issue before Sherlock had over his head and exert that influence.  Maybe.  It didn’t seem very likely, but there had to be some way to encourage Sherlock to realise that this wasn’t a normal case, and he couldn’t go at it like there was no danger involved.

That being said, being bitten hadn’t done much to him last time, so he might have a struggle on his hands to even convince Sherlock to try not to let _that_ happen again.

Sometimes he felt like he was working with a toddler, but at least it was a toddler he liked most of the time.

“He wants me to go to the hospital now.  Are you okay to be here on your own?  Do you want me to ask someone to come over?”

“Oh, I’ll be alright,” she said, standing up from the table.  “I’ve got dusting to do.  All my china…”

He nodded, not wanting to make too much of a fuss.  Again – he ought not to have to remind himself that she didn’t need patronising.  “Okay.  Well… you know we’ve got our phones if you need us.  And you promise you won’t leave?”

“I don’t think they’d be _here_ …”

“The woman’s corpse was found in Southbank, Mrs. Hudson.  Please.”

She sighed, looking down at the table, and nodded.  “Alright, dear.  Then I won’t.”

“We appreciate it,” John said.  She seemed convinced now, at least, so that was a job well done.  “Don’t wait to phone if you want to.  Take care.”

 

It took him maybe twenty minutes to get to the hospital in the taxi.  On the way there he checked the news on his phone, and was pleased to note that none of it had reached the media yet.  It was important that people were informed properly – fearmongering would only do harm in this kind of situation.  Of course, the news had been mentioning zombies for days, but hardly anybody actually _believed_ it.  It was coming up to Halloween, after all.  Really, the last thing they needed was the first official confirmation of a zombie presence in England to come from The Sun.  Undoubtedly the government would be releasing a statement later today to make sure that it didn’t.

He felt he’d come as fast as he could, but Sherlock was grumpy in any case when he arrived.  “You’re late.”

“I don’t think we agreed a time.”

“I did say ‘now’, in the text.”

“Well, do let me know where I can find a teleporter so that in the future I’ll be able to manage that for you,” he said, not really all that annoyed.  “Suppose you want to get to work.”

“Yes.  Tell them I can leave.”

“Well, how do you feel?”

“Fine,” he said stiffly.

“Please don’t make me ask the doctor how you feel.  Are you on any painkillers?”

Sherlock looked over the other side of the room, so John assumed it was a ‘yes’.

“Well, you’d have to be for your neck.  Dizzy at all?  Got a temperature?”

“I’m _fine_.”

John gave him a hard look for a moment, judging.  “Agree to take it easy, then.  I don’t want you aggravating your wound.”  Sherlock began to protest, so he simply talked over him, not even listening to what he was told.  “And if you don’t, I will send you straight back here and Mycroft will back me entirely.”

“You’re fussing for no reason.  The doctors said I’m fine.”

“The doctors said you weren’t going to die; not that you were fine to run around causing havoc like you usually do.  I’m serious, Sherlock.  Mrs. Hudson told me to tell you to be careful, and I agree with her.  I’m not going to have you running into their jaws again.  Do you understand?”

Sherlock sighed, glancing at the clock.  Evidently he decided it would be faster to agree, as he finally drawled, “Yes, alright.  Fine.”

“Good,” said John.  Well, that had been surprisingly easy.  “Then up you get.  Don’t suppose you have any idea where to start?”

“CCTV,” Sherlock said immediately.  “We know which room she was left in; the room she… walked out of.  I want to see the footage.”

“You still don’t totally believe it, do you?”

Sherlock swung his feet out of bed, grimacing at his crumpled clothes.  They hadn’t really had time to undress him and put him into hospital gear, particularly as the wound had been on his neck and not his body.  It made him look a tad scruffy, but he could deal with it for once in his life.  Their job wasn’t at all glamorous, after all – particularly today.

Back to the question at hand, though.

“Sherlock, you’ve seen one.  How are you still so sceptical about it?”

“You and I both saw Henry Baskerville’s hound,” Sherlock reminded him.  “Human senses are not infallible.  It isn’t proof.”

“Can we at least agree to operate on the assumption that they _are_ zombies?”

“And what advantage would that give us, exactly?”

“It’d keep us safe,” John said pointedly.  “That’s priority one.”

“Priority one,” Sherlock disagreed, “is finding out what they are, and where they came from.  Personal safety is irrelevant.  Survival instincts will look after that for us.”

“You don’t _have_ survival instincts,” he protested, waiting for Sherlock to do up his second shoelace.  “You’re a maniac sometimes; you just… march in, and I can’t have you doing that with this.”

“Mycroft said you cared.”

“Well, yeah,” John said, folding his arms.  “I’m your friend.  Like I care about Mrs. Hudson.  You’ve noticed that, haven’t you?”

“Hmm,” Sherlock said, distracted.  Maybe he was still a little dazed after all.  Well, he had lost a lot of blood, hadn’t he?  And he’d suffered a lot of pain.

“Look,” said John.  “Are you sure you can handle this?  I can go and get the CCTV if you want me to.  You can stay in bed and rest.”

Sherlock stood, smoothing his shirt out and gathering his things from the foot of the bed.  “Frankly I’d rather she came back to finish me off than stay still any longer.”

This wasn’t the kind of joke John thought was very funny, but he didn’t comment.  Sherlock already seemed in a grumpy sort of mood, and he didn’t want to make it any worse.  “Security office it is, then.”  A few moments later, he added, “I’m going to ban watching the footage of… it going for you… in advance.”

He clearly didn’t like this very much.  “Ban it?” he said.  “Why?”

“Because it isn’t very nice.”

“That’s no reason to ban anything,” Sherlock said, grimacing at his mirror image and turning away almost immediately.  “It could be useful.”

“I’ll tell you what happened if you don’t remember.”

“Your memory isn’t reliable,” he insisted.  “You were biased.  There will be inaccuracies.  I don’t see any harm in looking at the real thing, seeing as we have a perfect record of it.”

“Well,” John said, mildly put out that Sherlock wouldn’t listen to him.  Why he was expecting today to be any different to every other time Sherlock ignored him, of course, he wasn’t entirely sure.  “Don’t expect me to watch it.”

“I don’t care whether or not you see it.”

Typical.  John sighed and cast the slight sting he felt aside, quite used to hearing barbs like this from the man that people might be surprised to hear was his best friend.  Sherlock wasn’t trying to be hurtful, after all.  He was just being candid, and probably thought that was a good thing.

“Alright.  Don’t describe it aloud either, then.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“You didn’t see it happen.”

Sherlock couldn’t argue with that, of course, so he changed the subject instead.  Maybe he thought this was a subtle way of admitting defeat.  It was just as likely that he simply didn’t care – the undead were hardly Sherlock’s ‘area’, after all.  He was hardly bubbling over with enthusiasm to be a leader in the field.

Even so, he still seemed to want to work it out to some extent.  That was in his blood.

“I’m curious for the results of those blood tests.”

“Oh?” said John, ever the dutiful sounding board.

“There has to be some reason I wasn’t killed last night,” Sherlock said, apparently already fully aware of where the CCTV footage could be found – he didn’t pause as he headed out of the room, leading John around the hospital with ease.  “Or rather, some reason why she was.  I want to know what it is.”

“And you can’t work it out?”

“Of course not,” Sherlock said, mildly irritated, “because it’s all _ridiculous_.”

John couldn’t help but be a little bit amused by this obvious spitting of the dummy, but he simply kept his mouth shut and tried his best to keep up with Sherlock’s impossibly long stride along the corridors.  After all, Sherlock wasn’t wrong.  It _was_ all a little bit ridiculous – and John was just as keen to hear those ridiculous results as his friend was.


	6. Later on the 30th October, 2012

Unfortunately, two hours later Sherlock was still none the wiser.  The video was exactly as could be expected.  The zombie stirred slowly before it woke, and came to consciousness much like an animal would wake up.  Its eyes flicked awake fast, and its limbs took a while to come to life.  Otherwise, you’d never know it was dead moments before.

Of course, Sherlock could barely stand it.

“No; something,” he said, reaching to rewind the footage again.  “There has to be something.  Some hint.  If only I had _sensors_ …”

“But you don’t,” John reminded him gently.  “You do have other ideas, though.”

“Always.”  He leaned back in the chair, fingers steepled and eyes closed to think.  Apparently the other ideas hadn’t quite suggested themselves to him yet, but John saw no reason to burst his bubble and tell him he’d noticed.  “I need another victim.  That would be easiest.”

"We don't wish for these things, Sherlock," John reminded him, with much less judgement than most human beings would afford him.  "We're trying to protect the nation here - not put them on the line for the sake of solving the puzzle."

"And what exactly do you propose you do if there's no way to do it without some loss of human life?"

"There's always a way.  You're too clever for that."

The compliment worked, of course.

"Yes, yes."

He settled back down quietly after that, though, watching the muted tapes side by side with his eyes fixed firmly on both.  John wondered when - or rather, whether - they'd get to the stage of his friend actually believing they were just the dead risen again.  He could understand that it might be difficult to reconcile the information with your logic if you were the kind of person who thought that way, but there came a point when it was no longer logical to ignore the truth, too.  Proof wasn't always possible, after all.

Well, alright.  Maybe it was for someone like Sherlock - but they weren't likely to get close enough to a live specimen to get the kind of proof Sherlock would like for a good while.  It just wasn't possible.

"Perhaps we could distract him."

Or maybe it was.

"Distract it?  With what?"

"Meat, I suppose.  Raw meat.  If these things are mindless predators as your fiction seems to think they are, then he ought to be satisfied enough by that."

"And what if it doesn't go for it?"

"Then we leave the room and lock the door behind us.  But he _is_ strapped down, John; I'm not entirely sure what sort of danger you feel you're going to face from someone both legally declared dead and fully physically restrained."

 

The thing was, it wasn't dead by any regular standards.  John knew 'dead'. John was a doctor, and John had been a soldier, and since partnering up with Sherlock he'd gotten into examining crime scene corpses too.  The thing he was looking at was thrashing badly like an animal in pain - like an animal going back to the vet after a particularly bad experience, rather, only less frightened and more angry.

That being said, it might well be frightened.  John didn't care enough to find out.

Sherlock didn't have any such concerns holding him back, however, and opened the door without any visible discomfort about it.  John wasn't sure if he'd call it braveness or stupidity. Sherlock had always had a remarkable lack of self-preservation, though; this wasn't anything particularly new.  The pursuit of knowledge had led him to, and would presumably continue to lead him to, all sorts of places - neck wound or no neck wound.

He often heard people they worked with say that one day, he was going to get himself killed.  He understood why they might come to that conclusion, but he tried not to think of it that way himself.  After all, he'd been through that once already and didn't like to entertain the idea that it might someday happen again.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," said Sherlock.  A faint smile flickered across his usually fairly blank-looking face.  It was, as usual, in equal parts endearing and stupendously irritating.

"Just go on."

"I'm perfectly entitled to mock you," he insisted.  " _I_ wanted to examine him."

"If you think I'm putting my hands anywhere near its mouth to feed it," said John, "then you've got another few thinks coming.  Besides, I'm a doctor."

"I understand it all well enough-"

"Will you just get on with it so we can finish and go home and do something that isn't this?"

Sherlock's smirk widened slightly as he unlocked the door and pushed it open.  It was too heavy to swing, so it didn't hit the frame as the observation room door had when John came in the night before, but it attracted the creature's attention anyway.  It stared intently for a few moments, only distracted until it realised that there were people in the room - real, edible people.

It _strained_.

"Jesus Christ," said John, approaching it in inched steps far behind Sherlock's easy stride.

 _Stupidity_ , he decided.  It was definitely stupidity.

"It's very active," Sherlock noted, "though it hasn't consumed anything recently.  Which reminds me - it doesn't fit your legend as you seem to think it does."

"Why not?"

"He didn't finish her off."

John gave him a blank look, frowning lightly.  "It did kill her, Sherlock."

"Yes," he said.  "And what else?"

"It... made her into one?"

Sherlock gave him the usual look of frustration as he wore every time - and John supposed he should be flattered by Sherlock's continued ability to expect John would understand, but actually it was just a bit annoying.  "Alright.  What _didn't_ he do?"

"A very broad range of things, I imagine."

"He didn't _eat_ her, John," he finally revealed.  "If all the fiction and ridiculous folk tales were true, then here we have a commendably vegetarian member of the undead.  He had a defenceless victim lying on the floor, having _just_ attacked and bitten her, and he didn't take even a second bite."

"Oh."

"Oh," Sherlock said, pulling raw meat out of the bag they'd brought in and lifting it up in front of the creature's face.  Sure enough, it scrambled for it - but then, John supposed it had been scrambling for everything that came within half an inch of it in any case.  "Exactly.  'Oh'."

"I don’t suppose you’ve got any theories about why.”

“Reproduction.”

“You think it was trying to spread the disease?”

“Subconsciously.”

“But you think it’s an animal.”

“I do think they behave like animals, yes.”

“Then why didn’t it follow the survival instinct first?  It had to have been hungry by then.  The body’s been dead for days; it must have been starving.”

“Unless…” Sherlock led him.

It dawned on him quickly, to his credit.  “Oh,” he said again.

“Yes,” said Sherlock.  “‘Oh’ indeed.”

“But surely we’d have found the bodies?”

Sherlock didn’t look up from the zombie, instead preferring to watch it rip at the flesh with its teeth.  Some of them already looked damaged from the violent way it was chewing and biting – after all, it only had human teeth, and it was using them as though it had a mouth full of sharpened incisors.

“Not if he finished the job,” he eventually said quietly.  “Scraps of remains are much less conspicuous than a full corpse.”

John pulled a face, disturbed by the mental image and more so by the fact that he knew it could well be true.  At least there was a silver lining to it, if a fairly grim one.

"Small mercies, but... I suppose remains are better than another active attacker."

"Precisely," Sherlock agreed.  "And more likely.  We can estimate how much he would have needed to eat to sate his hunger before he started the transformation run, and then... attempt to match it up to accounts of missing people.  Start looking in side-alleys for bones."

He winced, aware this was probably a good course of action and doubly aware that he wasn't at all keen on doing it.

Someone was going to have to explain what had happened to these families, after all, and it was probably best for everybody if that person wasn't Sherlock.

He reached to touch the creature's stomach with a shaking hand, pressing gently to gauge how full it was.  "Hasn't eaten in a few days now, of course.  We should have known from the waste."  After all, the smell was putrid enough.  "At least it's a lead."

"Exactly," said Sherlock, who seemed in much better spirits now that they were heading somewhere.  That being said, he might just be really enjoying watching the zombie feed, which was quite disturbing really.

"I think we can get out of here now," John prompted.

It took Sherlock a while to pull back, leaving the meat behind.  "If you think you can't tell me anything else."

"That's all there is.  The sooner we find these bodies, the better."

 

Lestrade didn't seem particularly happy about releasing a full missing person's list, including reports that had not yet been publicised or even processed yet due to the fact that they were so recent, but he'd long since learned that doing requests that Sherlock Holmes made - and John Watson politely seconded - was generally a good idea.  It was also a 'do first, think later' kind of scenario.

"We do appreciate it," he told him, accepting the mug of coffee he'd been brought as Greg came to sit at his table some metres away from Sherlock's space.  He had a big map of London laid out on the desk and seemed to be comparing locations - how exactly the logic was working, John didn't like to think.  It didn't matter, anyway.  He hardly needed to check it to be sure it was right.  "It's good of you."

"Something big going on, I suppose."

John debated about telling him, but decided it would be best not to incur Mycroft's wrath.  Better not be direct.

"You read the papers."

"Of course."

He paused a moment, considering how best to say it without sounding like either a child or a drunkard, and eventually opted for, "Just... don't go outside alone and unarmed if you can help it.  Alright?"

Greg gave him a look, trying to judge if he was being funny.  "Happy Halloween?"

"I wish that was all it was."

"You can't be serious."

John shook his head, lifting his coffee to sip it.  "The government will be releasing a statement today or tomorrow.  There've been fatalities."

So much for being indirect, then - but somehow he doubted telling Greg Lestrade would cause too many problems.  The man was responsible enough, and he'd be in on it soon anyway.  Apparently Mycroft had gone to special ops first, and that was pretty understandable, really.  However, the Met would probably be next.

"That is..." He gave up, putting his coffee down and just sitting for a moment, staring into space.  John knew the feeling, so he didn't interrupt; he just waited for Greg to find the words.  They'd come eventually.  "It's terrible, actually.  It's bloody awful."

John nodded slowly, going a little distant himself as he thought about it for what felt like the thousandth time that day.  He knew he shouldn't think of the future and what was going to happen, but he just couldn't help it.  It was in his blood to anticipate things.  "All we can do is hope to contain it fast."

"Who's bringing my coffee?" Sherlock said from the other side of the room.

"You said you didn't want one," John reminded him.

"Oh."

There was a short pause before John sighed, standing up to go and lift his mug over.  They took it the same in any case - black on cases, white otherwise.  Sherlock had decided the caffeine was more effective without the milk to overpower it, and John had simply adopted the habit.  "Have mine."

"No need."

John shook his head, pushing it towards him a little more.  "I'll make another if I want one.  You're working."

He nodded briefly, giving him a short look before returning to the map and tracing routes again.

John left him to it.  It was easier than trying to understand, even if the only reason he wanted to was in the vague hope of being able to help.

"You've seen one, then?"

"Two." He tapped his neck gently, nodding lightly towards Sherlock.

" _No_ ," Greg said.  "You're kidding."

"I'm not," John assured him grimly.  "He shouldn't even be here.  He should be resting, or... you know.  But he's not."

"Why?"

John shook his head.  _Don't know_.  "We're waiting for the blood tests."

There was a long stretch of silence before Greg spoke up again.  "Jesus Christ, John."

He had no idea what to say.

 

It took Sherlock an hour to come up with seventeen possible locations - rather, seventeen he thought were most likely, and plenty more that were possible.  The game, it seemed, was on again. This time, though, even Sherlock didn't seem to think of it as a particularly good thing.


	7. 31st October, 2012

They started looking immediately, but they may as well not have.  There was nothing in any of the nearby locations they examined, and once night fell John was embarrassingly keen to get back to the flat.

Sherlock could have mocked him for that, perceptive as he was, but he didn't.  John probably would have spent a fair bit of time trying to work that one out if they weren't so focused on planning the next day's work.

Thankfully, that planning did pay off.  Three hours into the next day's hunt, they struck gold - though not as they'd expected to.  In a side-street where they'd been guessing a young art student may be resting, Sherlock found the carcass of who he believed to be an unfortunate homeless person who had simply chosen the wrong place to sleep one night as the undead stumbled into his path.  A week later and the remains were still tucked away with an almost deliberate neatness between two unused skips.

"A victim who would never be reported missing.  It's a remarkably good choice for a random attack."

John nodded, momentarily silenced by the awful thought that nobody would ever have reported this man.  It was a few seconds later that he managed to speak again.  "There are a couple of pieces large enough to compare the bite-marks to the one we have."

"Yes.  Bag them up and call Lestrade."

"You call Lestrade, then."

Sherlock gave him a pointed look, spending a few moments considering arguing before just pulling his phone out to text.  Satisfied by this small win, John crouched down with unmasked disgust to pull on his gloves and start picking through the mass of bone and scraps of flesh that had once been a human.

He bagged it up quickly, so as not to let the nausea build for too long, and then stood up and moved away from it straight away.  It took him a while to speak, and Sherlock didn't offer anything up either.

"Sherlock...?"

He glanced over, listening.

"If the dental records don't match..." He trailed off.  The meaning was clear.

"You won't like it," said Sherlock, "but I don't expect them to."

John sighed, looking out at the few people walking by at the end of the alley.  Just a few metres away was a normal London road, and goodness only knew how many people had walked along it past the body of this poor man since it had been left there.

"No," he agreed eventually.  "You're right."

"It's older than we think he is, for one thing."

John hadn't even really considered that.  "Bloody hell."

"It will be an epidemic if it's not contained soon," Sherlock said - and he wasn't fearmongering, or trying to say something frightening for effect.  It was just the truth, plain and simple and bluntly stated, and for once John wished he could say Sherlock was being a dick about things.  As it stood, he couldn't.  "It will spread exponentially.  People won't believe until it's staring them in the face, or maybe not even after that.  I'm evidence of that."

"It's not like you," John pointed out.

"No," Sherlock said.  "It isn't.  I suppose it's a rare case of logic confirming the illogical."

"But it _can_ be contained."

Worryingly, Sherlock didn't answer.


	8. Later on the 31st October, 2012

Five kids knocked on the door dressed as Romero zombies that night – kids in their early teens who ought to know they were too old to go trick-or-treating anymore, and who were certainly old enough to know better.  It was Mrs. Hudson that answered the door with the bowl of sweets, and who told them they ought not to make fun of people who’d had nasty shocks.

“Just an old mad bint in the paper, innit?”

“People are very frightened.”

“What, Nana?  You think you seen one?”

John hadn’t felt so angry in years.  Ordinarily he might just give them a weary look and ask them what they were playing at, but the combination of the stupidity and their apparent amusement from laughing openly at Mrs. Hudson had his blood boiling, and he shouted them off home with threats to call the police.

“It won’t change anything,” Sherlock pointed out as he came back into the living room.

“People have died, Sherlock.”  He sat again, picking his tea back up and taking a few mouthfuls all at once – a failed attempt to calm himself down.  “People are scared.  Even if it hasn’t been confirmed, you don’t laugh at frightened people.  It’s not right.”

Sherlock glanced out of the window, maybe watching them rocketing off down the street, shouting and shoving one another.  John could hear them, even if he didn’t want to look.  “They’ll learn soon enough.”

“And they’ll probably still think it’s funny.”

“Until it happens to their friend, or their sister, or their father.  The girl who sits behind them in Science.  The postman.  The cashier from the corner shop.  Then…”

John shook his head.  “They should already know better.”

“They should,” Sherlock said.  _But they don’t_.


	9. 1st November, 2012

The first half of the next day was spent fairly uselessly, though not though any fault of their own; it was simply that their search had been ultimately fruitless since the first body.  They were just about to leave one location for another when Sherlock got the call from Mycroft, which perhaps predictably he passed on to John.  Mycroft evidently thought it was predictable, at least.

"John," he greeted wordlessly, without even having to hear him speak to know who was holding his brother's phone.  "You and Sherlock might like to come back to the facility.  The blood test results have been confirmed, and they're somewhat... enlightening."

"In simple terms, then - what have they learned?"

"I'll allow them to explain.  In the meantime, I suggest you cover your mouth and nose with something.  Your sleeve will do, more than likely."

John glanced at Sherlock, vaguely confused and hoping this didn't mean what he thought it did. "We've got to cover our faces," he relayed, only for Mycroft to correct him.

"No," he said, "not Sherlock.  Just you."

This, needless to say, was among the more worrying things John had heard this week.

 

"Essentially," said the doctor, "we believe the cause is a bacteria.  At least, it looks and acts like one."

"Not transferred by the bite, then," Sherlock said.

"Not just that way, no," she agreed. "It's a fairly sickly thing.  It can't exist for very long outside of the body; it's not the right environment for it, so it just dissipates and dies.  As such, we don't think the chances of picking it up without some kind of invasive contact are very high, but they are there."

"Bloody hell." John scrubbed at his face lightly, considering.  "I must have come close myself, then."

She nodded, folding her hands.  "Yes, absolutely.  If any of the blood had gone into your mouth when you were disposing of her, then you would more than likely have been infected with it yourself."

"And the reason I didn't succumb to it...?" Sherlock asked.

"This is the interesting part," she said.  "At least in the blood sample we took on the night you were attacked, there _are_ still some of the bacteria - and we'd like to take another sample to see what the count is like now, if you're not opposed."

"If you like."

"Excellent.  But the number _has_ dwindled, and the reason is that your antibodies appear to be capable of fighting it.  Hers, on the other hand..."

"Ah."

She pulled over magnified photographs to show them.  "Your sample, hers, and mine and my colleague's to compare.  They look very similar, but this," she said, tapping the photograph of Sherlock's, "is an antigen that isn't present in either her or my system.  It is, however, in my colleague's."

"Genetic roulette, then."

"Exactly," she said.  "If I become infected, it will take me over.  You, on the other hand - your immune system is geared to be able to fight it off.  Chances are you'll be alright."

"Is this a test you can do quite easily, then?" John asked.  His blood hadn't been taken, but he supposed the reason they'd suggested he might like to cover his face on the way over was that they couldn't be sure either way.  Now he wanted to know, though.

"Absolutely," she said.  "We tested Mr. Holmes at his request as soon as he heard about the results."

"Apparently my brother and I have both been lucky enough to inherit it," Mycroft cut in.

"Would you test me?"

"Already prepared to," she said.  "Mr. Holmes said you'd better know.  It'll only take a pinprick; we can test for it very quickly.  If you could just wash your hands..."

He went to the sink to do as he was asked, considering what it might mean for him if this antibody wasn't there.  Would he be pulled off from investigating the thing?  Hell - would he actually _want_ to be?  Who'd want to risk it?

"You'll be fine," Sherlock said quietly, coming to stand beside him.  It was an unusual thing for him to say.

"It's a fifty-fifty chance," John said, surprised that Sherlock wouldn't just tell him that.  Usually he was fairly pragmatic that way.

Apparently, though, that wasn't his thinking.  "Regardless of whether or not you have it, the power is in the knowledge," Sherlock said.  "If we find that you can't come into contact with them, then we simply won't allow it."

"I don't think they'll always give us a choice," he said pointedly, but Sherlock was undeterred.

"So long as at least one of us can come into contact with them safely, then we can still operate the same as before," he insisted, stepping back so that John could get in and reach the paper towels.  "Either that or Mycroft will quarantine you in some dreadful cell or other to keep you unharmed."  John snorted, believing and hoping this was a joke.  "It won't happen to you."

John dried his hands, deliberately not looking at him as he did so.  This kind of talk was rare for Sherlock. Though it was still underpinned with logic, it undoubtedly came out of some sentimentality, or at least a feeling that he didn't want John to be frightened.  It was heartening, really. John wasn't the sort of man that had a problem with male friends caring about one another, and was content to see it as the good gesture it was intended as.  "Thanks."

Sherlock didn't reply to that, but John supposed it wasn't his style to respond to social praise.  After all, he didn't get much of it.

 

"I'm sorry," she said.

"No, no," John said.  "It's fine.  So long as we know."

 

Sherlock offered to nip in to pick up the curry on the way home.  John would have said there was no need to make a fuss, but Sherlock didn't often make an effort that way, so he didn't say anything.  Besides, it wasn't like he was dying; it wasn't as though he was infected.

He was just susceptible.  That was all.

It looked darker than usual outside.  The shadows in every alleyway seemed to be alive, and as the lamplights flickered on outside the taxi, John caught himself thinking that maybe it might be nice to just stay inside for a very long time now, until it all just blew over.

"Got pappadums," Sherlock said, climbing back into the taxi.  "Onion bhajis.  Pilau rice.  The usual mix of curries."

"You're spoiling me."

Sherlock gave him a look.  "Well, you're paying for half."

Oddly enough, it made him feel better to hear that at least that hadn't changed.


	10. 2nd November, 2012

They returned to the hospital the next day, accompanying Mrs. Hudson to have her tested.  She didn't really see the need for it, but had no objection.  "If it would make you feel better," she said, and not for the first time John thought that Mrs. Hudson was one of the loveliest people he'd ever met.

Sherlock, of course, just tried to reason it out.

"It's important to know these things," Sherlock said.  "It might come to evacuating you to somewhere that we can be certain will be safe."

"Oh, I'll be alright," she insisted, but there was an uncertainness there that made the centre of John's chest ache a little.  He hated to see her that way - as though she felt fielded into things and out of her home by not just the virus but also her pseudo-family in Sherlock and John.

Trying to fix that, he smiled and rubbed her hand gently for a moment.  "There's no need to worry.  It'll be fine either way."

Sherlock must have recognised that speech from yesterday, but he didn't say anything.  He just turned to look out of the window, watching the people and the streets go by with his usual intensity.  The people outside must be wondering, John thought, what on earth he was staring at.  Realistically, he probably wasn't staring at anything in particular.  He just liked to absorb things.  Better than letting his brain rest, in any case - at least that's how John read it.  The truth was that actually, John didn't understand Sherlock very well in a certain sense.  He knew how he acted, and how to communicate with him, and what he might be thinking in general, but he could never work out how he felt about anything.

Irene and the questions that had dragged up had demonstrated it best, of course, but now that the thought was in his head it just came back to echo every once in a while.  Part of him felt guilty for not trying harder to fill the gap in his knowledge, but Sherlock seemed resistant to that kind of conversation.  Maybe it wasn't any of John's business in any case.

He wanted it to be, though.  He acknowledged that, even if only very vaguely.

They arrived at the hospital not long later, shepherding their beloved landlady into what now felt like a second home to John.  They were there so often these days, after all, and he expected they'd continue to go there pretty often until this entire thing was over.  Goodness only knew when that might be.

However, once inside, they didn't encounter that usual calmness that existed there, and had still been there yesterday.

"Something's happened," John said uselessly.

"They found another one," said Sherlock, and though there was no obvious basis for it John wasn't inclined to disagree with him.  "John, take Mrs. Hudson to the laboratory.  I'll be along."

He didn't like the idea of being separated, but he supposed it made sense. After all, he didn't want Mrs. Hudson having to stand in the centre of all this hustle and bustle as they worked out what was going on.  It wasn't that she was infirm, of course, but it was his natural instinct to want to protect her.  Perhaps it was to be expected.  She was kind of like his non-biological mother, really; at least she certainly seemed to have some maternal connection with Sherlock that had stretched to him at some point.

"We'll take the stairs," John suggested.  "Lifts look busy."

"That's fine," she agreed, following him to the doors.  Apparently she was fairly unflustered by all of this, which John found quite commendable.  Perhaps it was his exposure to the zombies themselves which made it worse, but he found it all quite disturbing.  Hospitals could often be sites of panic, after all, but this place wasn't an ordinary facility, and he was used to seeing it calm.  "Sherlock's gone to find out what the fuss is?"

"I think so," John said.  In fact, he was almost sure, but you could never really be fully certain with Sherlock, so he didn't like to say 'yes' outright.  "He'll be back in a minute.  I hope he's not right."

"Unfortunately, he usually is."

"Unfortunately," John agreed, holding the door open for her as they reached it.  The lab was empty, which was unusual. Really they ought not to be in there alone, but they'd come to be fairly trusted people in this place over the past few days, and they had Mycroft's permission to be here, so John doubted if anybody would mind that they were waiting in here.  At least it was somewhere to sit.

Mrs. Hudson took a seat on one of the lab stools looking out-of-place and uncomfortable, and John sat down opposite her, resting his hands on the surface of the cool white table between them.

"You look very out of sorts, dear."

"Do I?" he said absently.  "Sorry."

"I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.  They'll have it under control."

"You're right," he said, though he wasn't entirely sure about that.  Zombies weren't especially easy to control, after all, and he imagined they would be having difficulty with bringing it in, wherever it was.

He heard his phone beep.  Usually he'd try not to look at it in a lab or a hospital, or even have it on, but this was something of a special case, and he had a feeling who it would be.  Of course, he was right.

'One of the doctors was found undead downstairs in mortuary.  Potentially bitten by the one you killed when she was loose.  Two nurses attacked. One injured but safe and the other dead.  Possibly about to reanimate.  Lock Mrs. Hudson in the lab and come to floor -3.'

This didn't sound particularly like a course of action John wanted to follow, but he was in no position to refuse.  After all, people's lives were in danger, and it was his job to assist Sherlock.  He turned to Mrs. Hudson, already apologetic.

"There's been a security problem," he said, guilty for lying to her.  It was especially bad because he imagined she had a good idea of exactly what whas going on. She didn't say anything to contradict him, though, so he pressed on.  "Sherlock wants me to lock you in here to make sure nothing bothers and go down to help.  Is that alright?"

"Locked in?"

"Sorry," he said.  "I'd leave it open, but I think..."

"I understand," she said gently.  She definitely knew; it had hardly even been worth lying to her. It was fairly selfish, really, that he had.  Even so, she didn't seem bothered.  "You go on.  I'll be alright. There's a water cooler over there, and I've got my book."

He leaned to kiss the top of her head, still feeling guilty about trapping her, and stepped away.  "Won't be long, with any luck.  Text if you need us."

"In a hospital?"

"It's fine this once," he assured her, opening the door and typing the code into lock the doors on his way out.

 

He found Sherlock on the third basement floor, as he'd said.  He was standing with a group of doctors outside the mortuary, looking in through the glass windows.  The place was well-lit, and John could see the doctor meandering around the far side of the room.  It was surprising that it hadn't seen the people looking in through the glass, really - lucky, too.

The body of the nurse was just in the middle of the room, keeled over and slightly curled up in a patch of dark blood.  He was undoubtedly dead, and no wonder; half of his neck and shoulder had been ripped out.  His arm was outstretched, and John wondered if maybe the other nurse had attempted to pull him out before just making a run for it.

"Fascinating," Sherlock said, nodding towards the doctor.  "He's looking at the equipment he used to work with.  I can't decide if it's coincidence or if he has memory of it.  Perhaps if we can restrain him then we can test it out."

"We're not going to be restraining it," one of the doctors said quietly, clearly quite panicked and sharp.  "We've sent for permission to kill it."

"Then you'd be the second lot to waste a perfectly good specimen," Sherlock said, sparing John a slightly irritated glance, "They're easy enough to restrain.  I have the necessary antibodies.  Has anyone else been tested and come out the same?"

Nobody answered.

"Fine," he said, taking off his coat. "It would have been much easier with someone else."

"You're not going in there by yourself," John told him in the firmest voice he could muster.  "You're not immune to having your throat pulled out."

"What - are you going to come in with me?" he said.  "I don't think so.  I want that doctor to examine.  If it means strapping him down myself before anybody can smash his head open, then I have no other option."

"Well, here," John said.  "Why don't you let them destroy that one, and then we can strap the poor nurse down in case he... comes back?"

Sherlock frowned off down the corridor, clearly unsatisfied.  "We don't know that he will."

"And if he doesn't, then all we've wasted is one chance.  I'm sure there'll be plenty more."

This wasn't the kind of thing Sherlock wanted to hear, but he couldn't ignore the fact that it was true.  He carried on frowning down the corridor, displeased as anything.  "The next one," he said eventually.  "I want the next one."

"Fine, then," John said.  "If you can do it safely."

Sherlock shot him a filthy look, as an ordinary person might look at him if he'd cursed badly at a group of small children.  "I survived once."

"Yeah, and you were unconscious for the hours and hours of agony I spent waiting for you to wake up, so you're in no position to decide whether it's alright or not.  That's the end of it."

He grumbled, stepping closer to the doors again to look in.  "Well, if we're going to kill him and strap down the other, we can't wait any longer.  I need something heavy and blunt."

The doctors just stared at him, horrified.

"What?" he said.  "If the permission came through, what were you planning on doing?  Burning the place?  I need something heavy and blunt, and one of you must have a surgical mask."

"Me too," John said.

"Not him."

"Thanks." He took a mask from one of the doctors who'd held theirs out to him, though they'd started to pull it back as Sherlock spoke again.  "Look, I'm not going to get close.  I'm not stupid.  I'm just there to back you up in case it gets messy.  Like you said before, I've already done it once."

Sherlock didn't seem to like not getting his own way very much, but there wasn't time to argue.  He didn't want to lose the chance at another reanimated body, after all.  "Fine," he said, taking the fire extinguisher someone had handed him and examining the end.  "Something for John, too."

There was a long silence, and then one of the junior doctors looked over to the fire axe on the wall.

"Hardly suitable," said Sherlock, but John was already heading over.

"It's better than nothing," he said, "and nothing is the alternative.  Plus, it's got a nice long handle."

Sherlock conceded to that, going to stand in front of the doors and pulling his mask over his mouth.  He didn't seem in the least bit nervous, which John found commendable.  People thought Sherlock was selfish and only really good for thinking about impossible problems, but really he was much more than that.  He was willing to risk himself for other people and for the sake of expanding his knowledge, and really that was fairly admirable - if a little twisted, yes.

"Close the doors behind us," Sherlock ordered the nearest doctors, "and put your full body weight up against it.  If we’re overcome, hold the door and have someone contact Mycroft Holmes."  He turned to John now, clearly not particularly interested in delivering full instructions to the people around them.  Leadership wasn't really his style, butrdering people around very much was.  "Ready?"

John nodded, taking a deep breath.  "As I'll ever be."

Sherlock counted down from three aloud, and then forced the door open with his shoulder.

The zombie looked up from the other side of the room, snapping its head up with such speed that it could have given an ordinary person whiplash.  In an instant it was running for them and they ran to meet it, stepping over the body of the nurse without thinking about how awful that was.  There wasn't time.  Sherlock went straight for the head, but missed as the doctor went for him; evidently new tactics were required, as he just used the fire extinguisher to try and push it away.

"I'll knock him down; you pin him."

"Yes," John called back, with just enough time to react as Sherlock gave the zombie a particularly hard blow to the chest and followed the hit through, knocking it to the floor and moving out of John's way to let him kneel and pin the body down.

"Look away," Sherlock barked, and for a moment John suspected it was to prevent him from being upset or nauseous until he felt the back of his head get splattered - presumably with bits of the old doctor's.  Exactly how hard Sherlock had hit the thing, John wasn't sure. It must have been _damned_ hard, as the skull had given way almost immediately.

"Done?" John said.

"Done. Get the towel, though. There's some on your neck."

"Jesus."

It shouldn't be harmful without getting into his mouth or anywhere else, of course, but John still wanted it off as soon as he possibly could.  It was as disgusting as it was upsetting.  He only took a few moments to do it before turning back to see Sherlock already lifting the nurse's body onto a gurney.  "Something to strap it down with," Sherlock said as soon as he saw John was paying attention again.  "Quickly.  We don't know when he'll move, if he ever does."

John looked around for restraints, the likes of which they used to hold bodies down for transportation, and growled with frustration as they weren't anywhere in plain sight, but finally spotted a drawer very helpfully labelled, perhaps by the old doctor himself, and brought a few over to dump them on top of the body.

They worked together to strap the body down, Sherlock from the top end and John from the feet.  They only relaxed once they were sure it was secure - Sherlock with the minimum required on the points they needed to be, and John with as many as he could damn well fit on there.  Either way, the nurse wouldn't be getting up again if he became an 'it'.

Sherlock pulled his mask away, though he waved a hand as John tried to do the same to his.  "No, not yet.  Not you.  Wait until you're elsewhere."

"Alright."

"Good," Sherlock said, finally having to catch up with his breath and ride out the adrenaline high without anything to expend it on.  "That was good.  Very efficient."  He paused for a moment.  "Shame about the loss of the sample, though.  It really is."

"I don't think that's really the primary concern at the moment."

Sherlock gave him a slight grin, gesturing to the doctors that they could open the doors again.  "Frankly I think we handled it well enough not to be concerned in the least."

"Well," John said.  "We work well together every other way.  Zombie-hunting's just another thing."

"Quite."

 

Mycroft, of course, was quietly furious.

"Not only did you lock a civilian in a laboratory in a hospital infested with a dangerous bacteria, and live contaminants," he said, "but you also suggested yourselves to go and deal with the vermin, despite the fact that one of you is _not immune_ , like some kind of murdering vigilantes.  And for what?"

"The more specimens we have to examine, the better," Sherlock said, totally unfazed by his brother's lack of support for his actions.  "I assessed the risk, and there wasn't a problem.  Particularly not with John helping."

"I pinned it down," John contributed.

"You pinned it down," Mycroft repeated, clearly not in the least bit impressed.  "John, I thought that you at least would approach these things a little more sensibly."

"There is no room to be cowardly in the guise of being _sensible_ at times like these, Mycroft," said Sherlock, evidently already tired of this conversation.  "There was a job that required doing, and John and I completed it.  There was no damage, and no injury.  Locking Mrs. Hudson away was a precaution to keep her safe.  Frankly, I think we handled the situation better than you are continuing to handle it now."

They looked at one another with barely masked irritation, and Mycroft broke the silence a few moments later.

"I don't suppose you'd care to tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong."

"You haven't issued a public statement, for a start," John said.  This had been irking him for the past few days.  "People need to know about this.  They need to keep themselves safe."

"The newspapers are already circulating rumours," Mycroft pointed out.  "They have been since before it was confirmed.  People are already scared."

"Not everyone believes it," John said.

Sherlock's response was far less polite.  "The only kind of people who are willing to believe that horror-film monsters are walking in London just because The Sun says so are the monumentally stupid, and they appear to be more entertained than anything else.  There's no evidence."

"Ordinary people don't always need evidence."

"I'll write a piece for the Guardian heralding the rebirth of unicorns, then, shall I, and see how many people try to find one for their children for Christmas."

"John believed it," Mycroft pointed out, sparing John himself a light glance.  "I'm sure many people have simply decided to trust their usually sensible friends who have a feeling about the whole business.  You could have trusted his instincts."

"John believes in God," Sherlock said.

"Ah," said Mycroft.  "Then perhaps not."

John sighed, leaning back in his chair.  "That's not the point," he said.  "The point is that people need to know about it.  They need to keep themselves safe; they need to stop their children walking home from school by themselves.  It's important."

"I know that," Mycroft said.  "We are preparing as we speak."

"Then get on with it," Sherlock said, "instead of trying to tell us off like naughty children."

There was a knock on the door, and a short pause before the doctor entered.  "Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Holmes," she said.  Her voice was an amusing blend of sincerity and fear - such a common reaction to the sophisticated but terrifying elder Holmes brother.  "I was told you wanted to hear about Martha Hudson."

Sherlock turned to look at her, no longer uninterested in her presence.  "Yes?" he said, even if it wasn't him that had been addressed.

"It's good news," she said, smiling faintly.  "She does have the antigen in question."

"I thought they'd take a lot of blood," said Mrs. Hudson, peering round the door - uninvited, but of course more than welcome.  "It was only a little prick."

Sherlock stood up to go and take her by the shoulders fondly.  "Mrs. Hudson," he said, in the softer voice reserved almost solely for her, "that is excellent news."

John stood up too, smiling as he came to stand by them both.  "It is," he agreed.  "I'm really glad to hear it.  Thank you," he added, glancing towards the doctor.  He hadn't noticed before, but she was what he supposed Victorians would describe as a handsome woman; pretty wasn't the right word, exactly. It was a sturdier sort of beauty.  "I'm sorry.  I don't think I caught your name."

"It's Helen," she said.  "Doctor Helen Taylor."

"Awful manners, that," John said, reaching to shake her hand.  "Sorry.  I would have asked."

"Other things on your mind," she said, and he couldn't argue with that.  "It's alright."

"Well, it's nice to meet you anyway, Helen."

"Oh, don't start," said Sherlock.  "It's only been a month since the last one."

John probably ought to have been more embarrassed, but he was used to it by now.  Helen afforded him a light grin for his trouble, too, so it wasn't too bad.  Better than rejection, at least.  It was odd, really, that a thing like this should make him think of today as a good one.  Nothing should really be able to rescue a day from having a corpse's skull smash near you and feel the splatter of it, but apparently it was possible after all.


	11. 3rd November, 2012

"You're not considering starting something with the doctor."

It was fairly out of the blue, but that was the way of things with Sherlock.  One minute you could be checking an alleyway for chewed up body parts, and the next you'd get some kind of uncalled-for comment about your love life.  John had learned, over time, not to be offended by it.

"No?  Why not?"

"I'd think even you could see there are more important things to be thinking about than that."

John had known Sherlock for several years now, and he often saw this reaction to women that he dated.  It wasn't every single time, but it was close enough.  If it wasn't specifically something along these lines - 'this is not practical' - then it'd be something else. It'd be some snide comment about the woman's lack of intelligence, even if she was clever enough for most people, or about how boring she was.

It had taken him a while to work it out, but a few months ago John had realised the truth of it.  Really, it was a fairly sad truth, too.  He was jealous.  This didn't mean he was jealous in a romantic sense, John hastened to add.  He was pretty sure he'd at least have noticed _that_ a long time ago.  No, this was more a platonic jealousy. He just needed the attention that John gave him, and hated for it to be divided.

John supposed he could understand it, too.  After all, if he only had one real friend in the world, he wouldn't want to lose them to a relationship either.  Thankfully, there was no risk of that.  Firstly, John had plenty of friends, and secondly - well.  Sherlock wasn't likely to run off and abandon him in a fit of love, now was he?

Back to the moment in hand.

"I don't think we necessarily have to forget every other part of life to be able to deal with this, Sherlock."

"Yes, well.  You're not as clever as I am, are you?"

"No," John said, having long since learned to concede that point whenever it came up.  "What's that got to do with it?"

Sherlock gave him a look as though _he_ were the long-suffering one, and John a constant drain on his energy and attention.  "If I decide that all our focus should be on this, then you ought to accept that I know better and agree with me."

John took advantage of the moment he spent turned away to pull a face, peering behind some bins.  "It's alright," he insisted after a while.  "I'm not going anywhere.  I'll still be working on the case.  Might not turn out to be anything anyway."

"I'm certain it won't."

"And why is that, exactly?"

He had a feeling he was about to be insulted, so he braced himself for it. However, his instinct turned out to be wrong.

"She's a lesbian."

John blinked, surprised at the sheer audacity of it.  Usually he might have just taken it on board and ignored him, but something as blatant as that felt like it needed addressing.  "Really?" he said, tone probably already a giveaway that he didn't believe a word of it.

"Yes."

"'Cos that's... that's really odd, that she'd agree to go for drinks with me, if she's..."

Sherlock gave him a look, clearly not in the least bit impressed with this.  He certainly wasn't embarrassed about the fact that he'd just told a lie.  "Priorities, John."

"I'd like to think we're above lying to each other out of jealousy."

That got his attention.

"Jealousy?"

"Yes, Sherlock," he said, trying to sound patient and failing rather miserably.  "Jealousy.  I'm not going anywhere.  Seeing some doctor we've met on a case isn't going to stop me thinking about that case.  I'm not moving out of the flat.  I'm not going to stop talking to you, unless you try growing fungus samples in the bath again."

"That was only once."

"My point is, there's no need to get your knickers in a twist.  Alright?  We're still..." It took him a while to squeeze the word out.  After all, as much as John didn't mind being close to his friends, he still wasn't particularly used to being directly sentimental with them.  "You know.  Mates."

Sherlock stood from his crouching position, apparently done with looking at the muck on the floor.  "You're missing my point."

"I don't think I am."

"It's none of my concern, in any case," Sherlock said.  Maybe it had been a bad idea to argue about any of this. He was bound to be in a bad mood all day now.  Apparently, that started immediately.  "We're clearly not making fast enough headway, so I'm going to search the Kensington sites.  You carry on here; even you can spot human remains without someone to point them out to you."

"Let's just be grown up about it, shall we?"

"I'll be back at the flat at some point tonight."

"Will you just calm down?" How the hell had this escalated so quickly anyway?  "Look.  I don't know what's got you so irritated, but let's just... ease it off.  Alright?"

Sherlock didn't seem interested.  He pulled his leather gloves back on, spending a few moments disconnected from everything before he looked back up again.  He had that look on his face that John found hardest to bear - not even an expression of dislike for John, but of total indifference to him instead.  Friends were supposed to react to each other, at least in some way.  When Sherlock looked at him like that, it made him feel like they were just total strangers.

That was hard, really.  John _did_ have other friends, but Sherlock was the closest of them, and the most intense.  Being isolated from him felt unpleasant.

"Fine," he said.  "But this is still too slow.  Have Lestrade send officers to the West End locations."

This was an unusual sort of request.  "You'll trust them with it?"

"Not happily, but the faster this is solved, the better."

John sighed.  The tone of voice was still cold.  It would last all day - maybe even tomorrow too.  Part of him tried to force himself to remember that Sherlock had been isolated for the vast majority of his life, at least socially, and that he hadn't had the same base of friends to teach him how to act with people as everybody else had.  Having only met one of his university peers, it seemed he hadn't been given the chance to mature there either.

All the same, there was always another part of him who just thought letting him act like this was condoning it, and he should be told not to act like a prick of a teenage boy.

"Will you cheer up if I tell you you're very clever?"

"Not when I can tell you're also thinking that I'm an overdramatic tosser, no."

Well, there was just no winning, was there?

 

There was a mutual agreement that searching the locations after dark was a silly idea, so when the light started to fade they headed back to the hospital to get a look at the progress there.  It turned out that while they'd been on the street all day, Mycroft's team had finally released the official statement.  It was, of course, predictably serious and evasive; the word 'zombie' wasn't used.

Maybe that was for the best, though.  It'd be all over the press soon enough, and all people really needed to know was how to stay safe.

"Yes, I thought I might find you here," Mycroft said, coming into the conference room behind them and pulling the statement towards himself with his fingertips.  "There's a television slot too, if you're interested, though it's largely the same wordage."

"At least it's finally out there."

"How observant of you."

"Yeah, well... it's about time.  That's all I'm saying."

Normally Sherlock might have backed him up, but apparently today was different.  Even Mycroft picked up on that, which really wasn't a best-case scenario for anyone.

"Lovers' tiff?" he asked, tone dry.

The look Sherlock gave him was frosty to say the least.

"How sad," said Mycroft, though his expression suggested amusement more so than sadness.  "Do inform me when you've decided whether or not to call the whole thing off."

"Is there anything else you need to tell us?" John cut in, trying to nip this one in the bud.  He didn't really like the way Mycroft mocked his brother. To an extent it was permissible given that they were siblings and that was just how siblings talked to one another sometimes, but more than once it had reached a sort of malicious, unkind territory that John didn't appreciate.  Mycroft could try to be cruel if he wanted to, but he shouldn't expect it to go unchecked.

Of course, Mycroft knew that this was an attempt to be protective.  His smirk broadened slightly.  "It's about Doctor Helen, isn't it?"  Nobody answered, which was confirmation enough.  Even John knew that.  "Shall I have her fired?"

"Don't be tedious," said Sherlock, standing from his seat.  "There are things to be getting on with."

"I'm only a phone call away if she continues to interfere."

"Sorry," said John, "am I... missing something here?"

" _Everything_ ," said Mycroft, but Sherlock had already pushed out of the door, and John preferred to follow him than to hear yet more pretentious blather from the elder Holmes brother.  He was still annoyed at him for divulging all those details about Sherlock to Jim Moriarty, and that wasn't the kind of small problem you could work past on a day-to-day basis with no bias.

"Do you want to update me on what he's talking about?" John asked, struggling to keep up with Sherlock's long stride.

"No," came the admittedly predictable answer.

"Well, then, let me rephrase the question.  What is he talking about?"

"I'd like to go and examine my corpse now."

John finally caught up with him as he pressed the button for the elevator, not out of breath but approaching it.  He had the distinct feeling Sherlock had done that on purpose, but he couldn't be done with mentioning that at the moment.  There were other fish to fry.  "Well, if you won't tell me, it's either something that annoys you or embarrasses you.  So which is it?"

" _You're_ annoying me.  I'd like to get on with the case."

"Fine," John said, giving up for now.  It wasn't worth getting flustered about all over again - probably.  If he was at all able to worm it out of Sherlock, his chances would be no different later to what they were now.  It was either possible or it wasn't.  "Fine.  But you've got to learn you can't just cut me out like this.  That's not how it works."

"I don't see why it shouldn't be."

"Well, you wouldn't."

Sherlock pressed the button to head up to the right floor, evidently finished with the subject.  Silence fell as they were lifted up, awkward and angry, and it remained in place even when the lab assistant asked if they both wanted something to drink; John had to answer on Sherlock's behalf.

"Black coffee, thanks.  He'll have one too."

She glanced over at Sherlock, noticing that he hadn't even looked up as this order was made for him.  Most people had already worked out that John and Sherlock operated as a two-person unit that just about functioned as one human being. Sherlock was the super-brain that everyone needed, and John was the translator that made what he said not only understandable, but also inoffensive and palatable as far as it could be.

Of course, that didn't mean they understood Sherlock any better, and he couldn't really blame them.

"Is he alright?" she asked quietly, watching him work.  She reminded him of Molly in a good variety of ways, not least because she seemed absolutely entranced by the cheekbones and the dress sense and the... oh, floppy hair, or whatever it was that they liked.  Thankfully, though, she didn't seem the type to romanticise it all in the way Molly did.  Sherlock was inescapably weird, after all - not exactly what most people would call boyfriend material.  God help anyone who thought he'd be good fun on a date.

"He's just working," John assured her.  "He concentrates."

"And finds it much easier to do that if it's quiet," Sherlock said dryly.

John gave her an apologetic look, mouthing his thanks as she left the lab.  Normally he might have given Sherlock a look for being rude, but today he didn't risk it.  One large-scale argument was quite enough, and it'd turn any other minor thing into a much less digestible problem.

 

“Pass over yesterday’s slides,” he said eventually.

It was four o’ clock – late, then, and long since they’d moved on from the unhelpful body Sherlock had examined, but at least John hadn’t been forced to wait forever.

“Here you are.”

There was no pause to say ‘thank you’, of course, but John had come to expect that when Sherlock was busy, and particularly when he was busy and coming down from a terrible bad mood.  The fact that he’d spoken at all was something of a miracle.  He had texted across the room before when he was feeling particularly childish.

It was John’s turn to interrupt the silence now, though, so he did just that.  “I suppose we’ll have to get everyone in for testing, just to be safe.  Molly, Greg…”

“Will we?”

“Yes,” John said patiently.  He’d stopped being astounded when Sherlock neglected to obviously care about his friends, but this was largely because he knew things didn’t have to be obvious to be true.  “Shall I call them?”

“Later,” he said.  “It’s not pressing.  Not yet.”

“You know what’s been making me wonder?”

Sherlock looked up at him, possibly debating how cruel to be with his response.  The end result was fairly mild, thankfully.  “Probably a good many things.”

“How long will it survive?  The first one?”

Sherlock sat back from the desk and the microscope he’d been using.  It took him a few moments to respond.  “Well, we fed him raw meat.  I don’t know how long that would sustain him for.  I imagine he won’t be able last longer than a few days with the rate he’s burning energy.”

“Just interesting how it hasn’t… you know.  Slowed down yet.”

“He must have, at some point,” Sherlock mused.  “It’s been a while.”

“Could check the CCTV,” John suggested.  “It’s twenty-four hours.  Might not be particularly compelling viewing, but…”

“Yes,” he agreed, standing up from the stool.  “Alright.  I’ll come back to this later.”

This was unusual practice given that Sherlock usually like to finish what he started.  John considered the implications of what that might mean, and all he could really come up with was the idea that Sherlock might be stumped by it all.  It didn’t seem that far-fetched, really.  Ordinarily he could work anything out, but this wasn’t their ‘area’, as Sherlock liked to call it, and he’d been the last to believe in it in any case.  Everybody else had kind of a head start.

No need to say anything, though.  Not really.

“Come on, then.  Bring your coffee.  It’ll take a while.”

 

The CCTV room was poorly lit, cramped and slightly littered with paperwork and pens that had apparently run out a while ago.  For all of five minutes John was mildly entertained by the fact that it looked exactly like TV executives would want you to think it looked, and then he longed for something more comfortable and maybe even with a plate of biscuits on the table.

He leaned forward, stretching his shoulders to try and get the crick out of his back.  No joy.  “What hour are we on now?”

“Fourteen,” Sherlock said quietly.  “He attacked our female specimen no more than two hours before that, and we’ve already decided he must have gone for other victims before then.”

“Has to run out of steam sometime, then.”

“You would think so,” said Sherlock, but that was all.  Maybe he was hesitant to apply his usual logic to the situation given that simply by existing, these creatures weren’t particularly obedient to that school of thinking in the first place.

John cleared his throat, settling back in the chair and watching the screen again with undisguised boredom.  They were watching it in fast-forward, of course, but all that was happening – and all that _had_ happened for the last fourteen hours of the footage – was a lot of thrashing.  Occasionally a few doctors came in, edging around the corners of the room, but that was about all the excitement there was, until...

“He’s stopped,” noted Sherlock.

John refocused his eyes, looking back to the screen as Sherlock rewound it for the precise moment.  Sure enough, the zombie had stopped moving just after hour fifteen had kicked in.  It had gone completely still, only moving its fingertips or twitching its limbs, until finally it settled absolutely as if dead.

“How exactly did nobody notice this?” John said quietly.

“I imagine it was when I was hospitalised... and yes, it was, according to the timestamp.  Other things for everyone to think about.  He was strapped down and unchanging over all the hours they’d last seen him. Why would the pattern change?”

“Just not moving at all.”

“Well observed,” Sherlock said, casting him a slightly annoyed sideways glance.  "He must be resting.  Conserving energy, or somehow producing it.”

Sure enough, it began to stir again a few hours later on the tape.  It didn’t take long then until John appeared in the observation room outside, just ten minutes or so away from catching it during its dormant period.

“That must be how it’s alive,” John said, turning to glance at Sherlock for confirmation that never came.  “It doesn’t need to eat if it can just… rest.”

“That rules out waiting for them all to die out in the event that the country is overrun,” Sherlock said dryly, which John suspected was supposed to be a joke.  “Every system as complex as ours needs nutrition to stay alive.  We can’t just shut off and recharge.  It doesn’t make sense.”

“Neither does coming back to life,” John pointed out, but he was more or less ignored.

“I want him freed,” Sherlock said.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Not set properly loose, obviously. Just in his chamber. I’m interested to see if he’ll still rest if he _can_ move.  Perhaps if he is able to move he’ll just continue to try and escape or find something to eat – won’t let himself rest.”

“I know what you’re saying,” John said, though it felt like a long shot in any case, “but what if it gets out?  What if they need to get in there for something?  It’s not safe.”

“Lots of things aren’t safe.”

“Yes,” he said, trying to keep a cool head, “but we don’t just put ourselves and everyone else in danger because we’re curious, Sherlock.  We can’t.  There are other things we have to worry about at times like these.”

“Such as what?  We’re not finding anything much in the streets anymore, and Lestrade’s teams are searching them faster than we could have before.  The only results I can get now are by looking at the specimen we do have, and I intend to do that.”

“It doesn’t feel very productive.”

“Well, it is,” Sherlock insisted.  “Knowledge is key.”

“Going for knowledge sent you into a room where a zombie bit your neck,” John grumbled, watching Sherlock’s hand lift to the bandage where the wound was.  It was still a little ugly beneath the padding – John had seen it while they were changing it – but at least it was getting better.  It could have been a lot worse.

“If I hadn’t been bitten, we wouldn’t have learned about the bacteria.”

“Oh, absolutely.  That’s definitely a fair trade. Risking your life for something we’d probably have found out later.”

“Yes, it is,” Sherlock said, frowning at his tone.  “The sooner you know something, the sooner you can use it to your advantage.”

“Only you can’t,” said John, feeling his temper rising, “if you’re dead.”

“The doctors could have.”

“And what would I have done?”

They looked at one another, hard but hateless as their arguments usually were.  This was less offensive than earlier, at least; this was born out of care rather than jealousy.

Sherlock spoke up after a long pause, finally deciding what it would be best to say.  “I assume you would have continued to help.”

“Alright, then. If I’d been killed earlier in the week - and we both know I would have been, if it had been me.  You would have been okay carrying on, no problem?  No distractions?”

“Of course I would be distracted.”

“And if we think of each other the same way, which I’d like to think we do, then I can tell you now you’d be ‘distracted’ for a good long time.  Maybe even a whole year.  You’d shrink up and not feel like doing anything at all, not even things you like; everyone you spoke to would ask if you were alright, and how long it’s been, and if there’s anything they can do for you, and it would drive you mad and you would want them to say it anyway, because at least it would go some way to proving that you’re not the only person in the _entire universe_ who’s ever been so _badly bloody hurt_.”

They didn’t really talk about it much, of course, but Sherlock still knew what he was talking about.  The look on his face was fairly fixed as he struggled with what he’d hear, and because of that John was expecting him to apologise quietly and move on, but he didn’t.

“We don’t, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t think of one another the same way.”

John paused, trying to process what that meant and ignoring the dull ache of what he assumed it had to be.  “So you wouldn’t-”

“No,” Sherlock interrupted.  “I _would_.  Something Mycroft said…”

“He said I cared,” John suggested, as this was the only thing he’d heard of over the past few days.

“Well.  Yes.”

The pause lingered between them until John finally stepped into it.  “Right.  Well.  That’s fine, really.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said, turning back to the screen in an attempt to close the conversation.  Whatever Sherlock was trying to say, it was bound to be something unpleasant that would keep him up at night against his will, so he decided it’d be better not to hear it.  Sherlock wasn’t sentimental. That was all.  Sherlock _didn’t_ seem to care about anyone.  Not even his friends.

“So long as you know that isn’t what I meant,” he insisted after a while, turning back to the screen himself.  John didn’t answer, leaving the floor open for Sherlock to speak up again after a few minutes.  “You won’t agree to freeing him, then.”

“No,” said John.  “Think of something else.”

Unfortunately, in the end, there wasn’t much thinking time to be had.


	12. 4th November, 2012

The phone call came not long past four in the morning, and to John’s phone.  Even before he’d picked it up, he knew something awful must have happened.  Wasn’t that everyone’s instinct?  People didn’t call at daft o’ clock unless there was something seriously wrong.  He stirred immediately.

“Hello?”

“Greg Lestrade needs you at the Jenner Facility immediately.”  It was Mycroft, but it had taken John a short moment to work that out.  Perhaps he was tired, or perhaps there really was a mild tremor in his voice.  “One of his officers has been… compromised, as it were.”

“What does he need Sherlock for?” John asked blearily, already climbing out of bed and trudging over to his flatmate’s room.

“Both of you.  I can’t be there and he requires assistance.”

“Yeah, but what with?”

“I suspect he’s having some difficulty with coping, in general,” Mycroft said.  “Are you on your way?”

“Mycroft,” he said, finally reaching Sherlock’s room and giving it a quiet knock on the door.  “It’s the middle of the night.  We’re going to need to get dressed first.”

“Are you at least preparing to leave, then?” he said, voice taking on a rare testy tone.  Something had really thrown him off-kilter today.

“Yes,” John said, knocking again.  “We’re-”

The phone cut off.

“Charming,” said John, going to slip his phone into his pocket when he realised he was still only in his boxers.  Fine, then. He dropped his hand to his side and just held onto it, knocking on the door again a little louder seeing as Sherlock still hadn’t responded.  “Sherlock.  Can I come in?”

Finally, there came a quiet, mildly puzzled response.  “Yes.”

He pushed the door open slightly to poke his head around it, hardly about to step into his best mate’s bedroom mostly naked just to deliver a bit of news.  Sherlock looked as though he was about to hear something remarkably odd.  “Sorry.  Mycroft phoned.  We’ve been summoned and apparently it’s urgent.”

“Oh,” said Sherlock.  This seemed to settle him somewhat, thankfully – at least this was something he could understand, John supposed.  “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.  “Lestrade’s at the Jenner.  One of his lot have been attacked, I think, but he wouldn’t say much.”

“You did say _Mycroft_ phoned?”

“Yeah,” John confirmed, rubbing at his jaw and stifling a yawn.  “Mycroft.”

Sherlock’s face lit up, fully awake and utterly triumphant.  “I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

He swung his legs out of bed, all limbs as ever.  “All this time he’s been tormenting me and I was sitting on this.”

 _I’m too tired for this_ , John caught himself thinking.  “Tormenting you about what?”

“You and I,” Sherlock said, going through his drawers for clean clothes.  “Look.  I’ll tell you in the taxi. Go and get ready, if it’s so urgent.”

None of that made a lick of sense, so John just reverted to his default setting and did as he was told.  It wouldn’t be the first time Sherlock had ranted without trying to be understandable, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. John had learned a long time ago to just get on with it, safe in the knowledge that Sherlock would explain his own cleverness at some point in the future.

That being said, he was curious.

Of course, all of that was overshadowed by the fact that someone had been bitten by one of the zombies – at least, that was what it sounded like.  It didn’t really wash over him until he’d woken up a little, but then he understood the implications of it fully.  Not only had they actually found another live one running around London, but one of them had been attacked and bitten by it.  Maybe they were already dead. Hell, maybe they were already _reanimated_.  He wondered if he’d ever met them, or if it’d just be another nameless body he and Sherlock would end up examining.

He heard his phone go off as he was dressing in his room, and went to look at it in case it was relevant.

‘Kindly refrain from mentioning to Sherlock that it was me who phoned.’

‘Sorry – too late,’ John texted back.

‘I suspected as much.’

‘Why?’

Of course, there came no response, but John supposed he could be patient enough to wait until the taxi ride as Sherlock had told him to.  So long as Sherlock didn’t want to think in the car, of course - either genuinely think, or _pretend_ to want to think to close his eyes for a little longer.  No - thinking about it, he wouldn’t do that.  Sherlock rarely felt the need to lie about anything as trivial as that, at least not to John.

“Ready?” John called, waiting by the coffee-maker in the kitchen, hoping to squeeze in the chance to get some in a flask for the taxi ride.  “Sherlock?”

“Yes, yes,” he heard, coming from somewhere in the corridor.

“Come on.  It’s been a while now.”

“Thank you for that remarkable insight, John,” he shot back, coming into the kitchen looking a little more dishevelled than usual.  Apparently even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t emerge from the small hours looking like he’d just left a hair salon.  “Are you making coffee?”

“For the taxi.”

“Good.  And you’ve called one?”

“On its way.”

Sherlock leaned against the counter, hiding a yawn, and stayed quiet for a long moment before finally interrupting the silence.  “A cigarette would be helpful.”

“No,” John said simply, pouring the coffee into two separate flasks and pushing one over towards Sherlock.  “Coffee.”

“Thank you.”

“So.  Mycroft…?”

“I said I’d tell you in the taxi.”

John gave him a look, and decided against being sarcastic.  It was much, much too early for sarcasm.  “Well, we’re both here now,” he said instead, as patient as he could muster.

Sherlock paused for a moment, opening the top of the coffee just to smell it.  “Lestrade,” he said.

“Yes. What about him?”

“Mycroft,” Sherlock said, “and Lestrade.”

It was getting difficult to remain patient.  “Do feel free to elaborate.  Any time.”

“Together, John,” he said, throwing him an irritated glance.  “Romantically - sexually. Or approaching it, in any case.”

John took a moment to process this.  He should still be asleep, after all, and had he really just heard Sherlock say what he thought he had?  “No,” he managed eventually.  “Really?”

“If you were distraught,” Sherlock said, putting his coffee down to pull on his gloves, “at this time in the morning, who would you phone?”

“Well.  You, if you weren’t… already there…”

Sherlock smirked, pulling the leather down over his fingers.  “Not _Helen_ …?”

“Not Helen,” John said, giving himself a mental pat on the back for not starting to snap.  “Look, just calling someone in the middle of the night. That’s not… Is it?”

“In this case, yes.”

John considered it for a moment, not able to work it out in his head.  “Well.  Why would they even have met?  They’re not – I mean.  Greg just got divorced not long ago, and all of that…”

“I imagine they met in the same way as you and Mycroft met,” Sherlock said pointedly.  “You don’t think he’d waste the opportunity to watch me, do you?”

This seemed fair enough.  “But they’re not even all that compatible.  Are they?”  He didn’t know anymore.  He’d never really thought about it, so it occurred to him that his kneejerk reaction might not be right.  Hell, though – not that he tried to peg people’s sexualities when he met them, but he’d never have marked Greg down as being into men.  Mycroft? Well, yeah, alright.  He could see that.  But _Greg_?

“It’s not a problem, is it?” Sherlock said.  His voice was surprisingly cold.

“No,” John assured him.  “No, of course not.  It’s all fine with me; you know that.  It's just… surprising.  That’s all.”

“Is it?”

John had been about to remind him that yes, that was exactly what he’d _just said_ , but he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket and noticed the low rumble of the engine outside the window.  “Taxi’s here.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, picking up his coffee again.  “Come on, then.  We can ask him, if you like.”

“I think he’ll have bigger things to worry about than answering our questions about his love life, Sherlock,” John said, hoping to be able to ward him off it.

“I wouldn’t,” Sherlock assured him.  John didn’t believe it in the least.

The taxi ride was mostly quiet now that they’d already discussed Mycroft and Greg.  They sipped their coffee quietly, grateful for the caffeine kick, and John spent most of his time worrying about what on earth was going on down there.  Now that the surprise of this relationship appearing out of nowhere had settled down, he was back to trying to guess who might have been hurt.

“Don’t,” Sherlock said eventually.

“Don’t what?”

“Keep thinking about who had to be killed to drag us out here.  We can’t know.”

“It’s not like you to say that.”

“I’m thinking about it,” Sherlock said.  “I don’t mind, but it’s the kind of thing that troubles you.”

“Since when have you cared about whether or not I’m _troubled_ by something?”

“The 29th of January, 2010.”

It took John a moment to work out what this date referred to, but when he did it filled him with a rare case of the warm and fuzzies; it was the day they'd first met.  He gave Sherlock a light grin, pleased as punch to notice that the man actually looked something close to embarrassed for once.

“See, that’s nice.  You could do that more often, you know.  Say something nice.”

“I could,” Sherlock said, “but then you wouldn’t smile so much on the occasions I do.”

This was such a bizarre statement that John had to be shocked out of thinking about it, which was exactly what happened as the taxi pulled up outside of the Jenner Facility.  It was the same building as they’d spent so much of their time in over the past few days, but today they barely noticed the ugly old architecture or the bright beacon of the backlit signpost in the night, as Greg Lestrade was standing outside and he didn’t look best pleased.

John supposed this might have something to do with the fact that he was being shouted at by Sergeant Donovan.  Just a guess.

“How could you bring him here?” John heard her shout as he climbed out of the taxi, and wondered whether this might be one of those times he had to prevent someone from punching Sherlock.  “It’s his bloody fault!”

“Sally…”

“No, it is.  Look; here he comes now.  Lord of the Undead.  Bet he asks to play with the corpse.”

“Sally, he won’t ask to see the corpse.”

John was pretty convinced of the opposite, actually, so he nudged Sherlock with his elbow as they approached.  _Don’t_.  “Greg.  You needed us.”

“Yeah,” he said gratefully.  “I do.  We’ve had a nasty accident.”

“I don’t suppose Anderson managed to stumble into one of their open mouths,” said Sherlock dryly.

John nearly had time to fit in a smirk before Sally threw all her weight into shoving Sherlock. Thankfully, he managed to absorb most of the force, only staggering backwards somewhat as Greg and John launched forward to hold her back.  She was fiercely strong, and with how absolutely livid she was it took both of their power combined to keep her off him.  All the good will in the world, however, couldn’t keep her from shouting.

“God only knows we all wish it had killed you instead, you fucking _psychopath_!”

Sherlock seemed mostly nonplussed by the shouting, thankfully, and only frowned, shaking his head.  “Anderson?  What was Anderson doing on this?”

“Forensics, you idiot!  That’s his job!”

“And what parts of looking for obvious signs of human remains or reanimated corpses do you require a forensic scientist for, exactly?”

“Sherlock,” John said quickly, trying to shut him up for a minute.  “Look.  Sergeant Donovan, I’m sorry, but it’s nobody’s fault.  There’s nothing we can do now. Just… stop _struggling_ , will you?”

“She can hit me if she likes.”

“No, she can’t,” Greg corrected immediately.  “Now, as John says – if we could all just calm down...”

“Has he reanimated?” asked Sherlock.

“Not yet.”

“No,” Donovan snapped, finally tugging her arms free and taking a few steps away from them all.  She was, after all, a professional.  John supposed he’d go just as berserk if someone seemed to be taking the mick out of Sherlock being hurt, or dying.  “He’s not.  And he won’t.”

“You don’t know that,” said Greg, tone wary, but she cut him off.

“I know that.   You’re not going to defile him; you’re not going to… do whatever you usually do…”

“It’s either that or he comes back hungrier,” Sherlock said.  John could hear the smile in his voice, but he suspected he was the only one close enough to Sherlock to do so. Besides, he knew his friend’s twisted humour better than anyone else.  Thankfully, he was good enough to keep that smile off his face.  “There isn’t a choice.”

“There is a choice,” she said, “and I’m making it for you.  _No_.”

They stared one another down for a few long moments, Sally’s face infinitely more passionate than Sherlock’s, until a nurse came darting out of the hospital front doors.  John vaguely recognised him – enough to notice he seemed vaguely panicked.  Maybe that was the kind of thing you could spot anyway.

“Sorry to interrupt, Detective Inspector,” he said, slightly breathless.  “Your man is, ah… he’s come back, sir.”

Sherlock waited until Sally to turn her back before giving her his ‘told-you-so’ look, which John thought was bloody admirable, actually.

For Sherlock, at least.

 

They looked at Anderson’s struggling corpse for what felt like forever.  Someone had had the good sense to strap it down; if they hadn’t, then the sterile-white facility room would be splattered in rather a different colour now, probably.

It was horrible, actually, to see somebody he recognised.  As much as he’d never particularly liked Anderson, he’d never wanted to see him hurt.  Even his long-time combatant Sherlock had surely never _really_ wanted to see him hurt – and ‘hurt’ didn’t even begin to cover this horrible state of being in any case.

“I wanted to sit with him a bit longer,” Sally said dimly.  “Wanted his wife to have her chance.”

“Good of you,” said Sherlock.

“Shut up.”

They listened to the snarling for a few more moments before Sherlock spoke up.  “Both of you need to go and have your blood tested for the antibodies.  Have all your officers tested too.”

“Oh, no,” said Sally.  “Don’t think you’re fielding me out like that.”

John turned to her, annoyed that he couldn’t emote this properly from behind the mask.  He didn’t particularly like Donovan either, but who’d want to see her upset?  “It’ll be much easier if you just let us do it.”

“I don’t want you to do it.”

“It has to be done,” Greg said, “and we have to be tested.  Just let them get on with it, Sally.  Please.”

“He’s always hated him.  When I come back he won’t even be recognisable.”

“It will be clean,” Sherlock said evenly into the silence.

“You what?”

He turned to her in that cold and noble way of his.  “It will be clean,” he repeated.  “He’s strapped down; it isn’t an attack in blind panic.  It'll be a quick decapitation.  That is what you can expect to see when you come back.”

She fixed him with a distrusting look.  “If I come back and it’s-”

“You won’t,” he insisted, voice the same slow drawl.  “I’m not giving up the specimen lightly.  Go and test your blood.”

“So you think it’s a favour, then, do you?  Not smashing him up?”

“It is.”

“Do you think I want to come back in here and see him with his head cut off?  Do you think that’s a favour to me, or to anyone?”

“It’s the least disturbing way.”

“So what you’re saying,” she said, voice rising slightly in her anger and pointing at John without looking at him, “is that if _he_ died from this… that you’d consider us chopping his head off a favour.  That’s what you’re saying.”

“If he could otherwise have been utilised for testing and you chose not to out of respect, then yes.”

“You just don’t understand love, do you?”

“Sally,” Greg said quietly.  “Come on.  Let them get on with it now.”

“You’re sick,” she told him.  It wasn’t the first time and it likely wouldn’t be the last, but John had never heard her spit it at him with such poison before.  “You know that’s the reason?”

Sherlock’s brow furrowed lightly, expression setting in a crude display of displeasure.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“ _Sally_.”

“Oh, really?” she said.  “You must think we’re really stupid, don’t you?  Alright, then.  I’ll spell it out.”

“Sergeant Donovan.  Sally. With me.”

“What is she talking about?” John said uselessly, largely because he’d already guessed what she was going to say and didn’t agree with it in the least.

“Nothing,” said Sherlock.

Unfortunately, it came out at exactly the same time as Sergeant Donovan pressed on, eyes still fixed firmly on Sherlock.  “That’s the reason he’ll never want you.  D’you think he’d look twice at you, knowing what you’re like?  That you don’t understand it – any of it?”

“That’s enough,” Greg insisted.

“It’s not enough,” she said, speaking up over a sudden burbling growl from Anderson’s corpse.  “If it wasn’t for his stupid idea to involve our police force in his bloody monster hunt then this wouldn’t have happened.”

“I think we’re all assuming a few too many things here,” John said, still recovering somewhat from the implications.  “Sally, please just... let Greg take you for testing. Please.”

“I’m sorry, John,” she said, though she didn’t sound very sorry.  She didn’t sound much of anything, really – just damp.  John could understand that.  “It’s not you.  But he _is_ a psycho, and you can’t be told that enough.”

Finally, she allowed herself to be led away, giving Sherlock one last hard look as she left the room.  John respected Sally, even if he didn’t like her very much, and he understood that she was hurt, but hell. What kind of display had that been?

“Well,” John said.

“Get the fire-axe, would you?”

He was already moving on to prepare to decapitate the body, but John wasn’t having any of it.

“Oh, no.  You don’t get away that easily,” he said, though he rolled his sleeves up ready to work on Anderson all the same.  “She was talking about something there.  And Lestrade didn’t disagree, and I want to know if that was… you know.  If that has any grounding in the truth.”

“What part of it?”

“You know what part of it, Sherlock.”

“Well, if we both already know, then I suppose you won’t mind clarifying.”

If he was wearing a poker face, then it was a remarkably good one.  John really hoped that he wasn’t, though.  The last thing he needed was for there to have been some kind of undercurrent of romantic interest that he’d never picked up on, especially now.  That kind of thing could really throw you off, and as friends they worked together pretty well.  He didn’t want a mess between them.

“Alright, then,” John said.  Better to clarify it than to never know, surely?  “She implied…”

“Yes,” Sherlock said into the gap, clearly not particularly interested in letting him pause any longer.

“She implied hat you have feelings for me.” Pre-empting Sherlock’s next question, he elaborated.  “Romantic feelings.  Is that… you know.  Is that true?”

“Would you get the fire-axe?”

“Sherlock-”

“Get the fire-axe, please.”

It dawned on him slowly, and he was horrified by it right from the beginning.  He headed off to get the fire-axe as requested, just giving them both a moment to assimilate before he pressed on.  “Sherlock…”

“It hardly merits a discussion either way.”

“Well.  It… it does, doesn’t it?” He handed over the fire-axe, not noticing how easily he was managing to ignore the jerking corpse between them.  Well, this was a fairly big distraction, after all.  “It’s a big deal.”

“It isn’t a big deal.  It isn’t any sort of deal.”

“But…”

“You didn’t even notice,” Sherlock pointed out, and John couldn’t argue with that.  “It is minor.  It is manageable.  It is irrelevant.  That is all you need to be aware of.”

“How long, though?”

“If this is a vanity question I’m not inclined to answer it.”

“No, not for vanity,” John said, quiet behind the mask.  “I’m sorry I didn’t notice.  I wouldn’t have… you know.  All the girlfriends in your face.”

“They don’t matter,” Sherlock assured him, focusing his attention on the body.  “They were always your secondary interest anyway.”

“And you were the first?”

“Yes.”

John had been about to argue until he realised it was true.  Alright, then.  Fair enough.  Another question instead, seeing as there were plenty of them.  “Is that what Mycroft was talking about earlier?” He paused, then realised.  “Is that what _you_ were talking about earlier?”

“Yes.”

“Bloody hell, though.”

“Rather less dramatic than that.”  He paused, interrupted by a particularly ferocious snarl from Anderson.  “I don’t suppose you could be persuaded to have this conversation at another time.”

“Another time here meaning… not over the scrambling corpse of an old colleague?”

“In so many words.”

“Yeah, alright.”

 

“I didn’t mean it, you know.”

They’d been quiet in the taxi back until then.  This wasn’t unusual, really. They often let the day or the case sink into their minds on the journey home rather than talking about it.  They were, after all, flatmates and friends; they were capable of sitting in silence in one another’s company without it being horrendously awkward.  Today, of course, the food for thought was slightly more personal, so maybe John did feel a little uncomfortable as he spoke up to try and get him to clarify.  Please, not in front of the taxi driver.

“Didn’t mean what?”

“Anderson,” he said, turning to look out of the window as he liked to do.  “I didn’t think he’d be there.  I wouldn’t have said anything.”

“I know you wouldn’t have, Sherlock.”

“So long as you do.”  Another short pause, and then – “Donovan didn’t know it.”

“I know,” John said dumbly, not entirely sure what else to say.  All that sprang to mind seemed useless, but after a few moments he decided to say it anyway.  “She’s… you know.  She’s always thought badly of you, because she doesn’t understand the way you think.  She was bound to be like that.”

“Yes.”

“You won’t worry about it?”

“No.”

It was safe to assume, really, that Sherlock was above all that kind of thing, but that didn’t mean John was happy to leave it without checking.  Sherlock was terrible for internalising his feelings in any case. The last thing he needed was to leave a question unasked when Sherlock really wanted to talk about something.  “Then you’re okay about it?”

“More or less.”

“Not entirely?”

Sherlock turned to look at him, expression unusual.  John couldn’t work it out until he started speaking.  “I admit,” he said, and that alone was enough to spring it.  _Aha; guilt.  Confession_.  “If it had to be anyone, I’d have chosen Anderson.”

“You didn’t have to choose anyone.”

“I know,” he said.

He didn’t look much better for saying so.

 

The right time came up later that evening – at least, as close as they’d get to the right time.  John didn’t really want to say it, but it was always fairest to be honest with people, even if it didn’t feel good at the time.  It wasn’t for his benefit, after all, but for the other person’s.

“Sherlock,” he said quietly, putting down the doom-and-zombie-gloom newspaper he’d been pretending to read for half an hour.  Presumably Sherlock had seen that and known this was coming, as he didn’t have anything to occupy himself with – not a book, or the television, or even his own thoughts.  You could tell when Sherlock was thinking properly in a comfortable place, as it occupied every inch of him; in the absence of requiring permission for things, his body merely found the places it best liked and settled there, regardless of how it looked.  Not so today.

He hummed shortly in response, looking away.  John wasn’t sure when he’d started looking at him, which was mildly unnerving.

“I just feel as though it’s fair of me to tell you I’m not gay.”

“Irrelevant,” said Sherlock.

“I don’t think it is, at the moment,” he said, trying to keep his tone gentle.  It was easier today.  Usually he got a bit annoyed when Sherlock spoke back like that, if only in an endeared way, but not this evening.  All he could feel for Sherlock now was platonic affection and, though he’d never mention it, pity.  “I think it is relevant.”

“It isn’t relevant,” Sherlock insisted.

John waited for the explanation, but nothing came.  “Sherlock?”

“Yes. What?”

“Do you want to go some way to explaining how what I just told you isn’t relevant to what I found out today?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Well, then, can you explain anyway?”

“Don’t.”

“Would you just tell me, please?”

“Let the record show this isn’t something I want to talk about.  I am under duress.”

“And I very much appreciate that you haven’t stalked off to play the violin, because I’m just trying to understand and I’d really like to be able to do that.”

Sherlock gritted his teeth lightly, looking off in the other direction.  John realised not for the first time that his friend wasn’t entirely like other people.  As far as John knew, Irene Adler was the closest Sherlock had come to romance in his entire life. Judging by hints from Mycroft, he was even still a virgin.  It was all pretty sad, really, and watching him struggle with embarrassment now was unpleasant.  It wasn’t even a sweet sort of embarrassment, like the soft blush you saw on people who’d mildly shown themselves up.  This was developed discomfort – _shame_ more than anything else.  John hated to see him like that.

“You have a distinct…” He shook his head, searching for a word before settling on one he apparently didn’t like very much.  “ _Standard_.”

“And you don’t think you’re…?”

“Obviously not.”

“Sherlock, that’s… that’s ridiculous.  You’re brilliant.  I mean… as I said.  I’m not – you know.  I’ve just said.  But the idea that you don’t meet some _standard_ or other is just… insane.  You’re absolutely unbelievable.”

“I can think,” he said bluntly.  “The ability to think does not equate to attractiveness.”

“Sherlock-”

“I won’t talk about it anymore." John would have resisted that decision if he thought he had the fainted chance of changing Sherlock's mind. "Go to bed.”

“It’s been a long day for everyone.  You go to bed, too.”

“At some point.”

He meant to say something else, but words failed him.  Instead he reached over to pat him awkwardly on the shoulder as he passed, irritated at himself for being unable to communicate the horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach.  It was a strange sensation. He found himself _wanting_ to be able to be attracted to Sherlock, and wanting to return that obviously fairly intensified feeling, and it was frustrating to him that he couldn’t.

“Goodnight,” was all he felt able to say, in the end – and how could that ever be enough?


	13. 8th November, 2012

They stalled somewhat, moving on from Anderson’s turning.  It wasn’t that they were particularly upset by it, of course. Sherlock seemed to consider it a best-case scenario, even.  Maybe it was, John noted, though not without a slice of guilt.  Better Anderson than Lestrade, though.  There was no point pretending otherwise.

All the same, his death hadn’t achieved anything.  The officers had destroyed the corpse on the scene as soon as it had attacked Anderson, and of course he’d been disposed of.  Other leads were few and far between.  Sally had ensured the entire process was slowed down monstrously, to the point where several newspapers had started to print a daily list of the deceased.  Civilian websites kept running totals, and angry bloggers screamed for army intervention, and honestly John wasn’t sure why nobody was listening to them.

“It can still be contained,” Mycroft insisted when they saw him briefly.  He didn’t look particularly well, but John supposed nobody did at the moment.  The extra police on the streets only served to make everybody more nervous, after all.  They didn’t know what to do any better than the next person when one of the undead came running out for a victim.

“It’s all going wrong, Sherlock,” John said quietly as they looked through a row of old boarded-up houses in Clapham.

“Hold the torch steady.”

He did as he was told, glancing around the rest of the dim room as Sherlock continued to examine the bloodstain on the floor.  There was every chance it could just be from a fight between kids or drunks, of course. John wasn’t sure how he was going to work it out from the stain alone, but he left him to it.  Much like the way people often talked about God's thought processes, John didn’t presume to understand the way Sherlock’s mind worked and what his limits were.

“It isn’t going wrong,” he said finally.  At least thirty seconds had passed since John had first mentioned it, but they were both used to these long gaps, so they didn’t pay it any heed.  “It’s just going.  This was always how it was bound to spread.”

“Wouldn’t you have preferred a cure by now, or… or some kind of hint at what started it off?”

“Yes, but it’s not possible.”

“Of course it’s possible.”

“Eventually,” said Sherlock, distracted but at least trying to talk back.  “You know as well as anyone that these things take time.”

“I also know that having a reanimated corpse chomping at the bit to get at your loved ones and the rest of the bloody country should be making everybody move and work a lot faster than they actually are."

“It’s not often that I have to encourage _you_ to be patient,” Sherlock noted, pulling out his pocket magnifier and leaning closer to the floorboards.  “But there it is.”

“All those zombie movies and when it finally happens everyone just… keeps going to work.  Buying the teabags and washing up liquid.”

“And here we are,” Sherlock said, sitting back and balancing himself before getting to his feet again.  “You and I, out to return corpses to their body bags.”

“As it should be,” John said.

Sherlock smiled faintly, sweeping the dust from his knees.  “As it should be.  And that,” he added, looking up again now that the subject was no longer so sentimental, “is ordinary human blood.  Not really enough to indicate a major wound, or a struggle.  It’s as likely to be a nosebleed as anything else.”

“Obvious place for a nosebleed.”

“It is,” Sherlock said, “if you were attempting to snort something you shouldn’t, perhaps.  If you were new at it.  Wouldn’t this be the sort of place you would go, if you were stupid?”

“I suppose so.”

“No lead for us, in any case.”

John sighed, shoving his hands back into his pockets and looking out of the window.  “Christ.  Where are they all hiding?”

“Eventually we’ll find out.”

“On to the next one, then?”

Sherlock checked his watch.  “It’s coming on to ten o’ clock.  You haven’t eaten yet.”

“ _We_ haven’t,” John said pointedly, “and that’s never stopped us before.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, “but there was nothing for breakfast either, and you’re not used to it.”

“I’ll survive.”

“Well, it’s me doing all the hard work, John, and I’m feeling a bit lightheaded now, actually.  I really would just like to sit down and eat.  Maybe Chinese.”

“Sherlock…”

“Horrible stomach pains,” he said, not even troubling himself to _pretend_ that he wasn’t lying.  “Quite chronic, in fact - and my bad neck.  You won’t make me carry on through all that, surely.”

“Look.  I appreciate the concern, but…”

“Excellent.  We can get a taxi from the main road.”  He was already heading towards the door, and there seemed little he could do to slow him down; instead, John just followed him out, slightly grumpy and slightly embarrassed that Sherlock would try so hard to get him to go and rest.  It wasn’t like him, and it just outlined this new _feelings_ business they had to contend with.  Who’d have ever thought he’d struggle with something like that almost as much as Sherlock was?  “Hope you’ve got some cash on you.”

“All this is doing is slowing the search down.  You said yourself the other day that it’s not moving quickly enough.  What else do you want me to do?”

“Prevent yourself from becoming ill, at the very least.”

“I’ve been wearing my mask every time we go near them,” John said, deliberately misinterpreting what he said.

Of course, Sherlock seemed to know that it was deliberate, responding just as dryly.  “If you’re stupid enough to require me to explain what I meant, then you don’t deserve the breath it would take me to do so.”

“Though apparently it’s worth the breath to tell me off.”

“It’s always worth the breath to tell you off.”

This sounded suspiciously like flirting, so John kept quiet until they reached the main road and saw a taxi to hail down.  It felt safer, then – like somewhere they couldn’t have a strange conversation that left John wondering how he felt.  “You want me to phone for the takeaway?”

“Yes.  Good.  Do.”

He’d only just climbed into the taxi and dialled the number when he looked up and noticed Sherlock was looking at him – not out of the window or towards the front of the cab, but at him.

“All okay?”

“Yes.”

“Right.  Okay.  Good.”

“Mycroft thought you were in love with me,” he said vaguely, finally turning away as he said it.  It must have taken a lot to speak so frankly about it, so John could only admire that.  He considered putting his hand on Sherlock’s shoulder or his arm, but it didn’t seem fair.  It’d cause more uncertainty than comfort, which they really didn’t need.

“Oh?”

“Yes.  He was quite convinced.”

“Sorry,” he said.  It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but that didn’t make it any easier.  He wasn’t entirely sure how Sherlock was handling it all, because Sherlock didn’t seem to want him to know, and that made him nervous.  After all, regardless of whether or not he reciprocated – and he _didn’t_ – he still didn’t want his friend to be hurt.

“Hardly your fault.  At the very least I can console myself with the knowledge that Mycroft was wrong about something.”

John laughed quietly, pleased to see they could at least still be themselves in some small way – taking the piss out of Mycroft and getting on with solving the unsolvable.  Phoning for Chinese.

“You were going to-”

“Yeah,” said John, redialling the number.  “Sorry.”

“You can stop saying that, you know.”

It was already ringing, and John was grateful for the excuse not to say anything back.


	14. 12th November, 2012

It became necessary, eventually, to up the amount of official government press on the attacks.  There were more TV ads commissioned, and massive posters put up on billboards across the country. ‘Keep calm and carry on’ was resurrected, of course, along with the slightly less catchy slogan of ‘Calm down.  Arm up’.

Classes started springing up across the country, teaching attendees how to cause fatal brain damage to the undead.

Mock the Week spent twenty minutes discussing what could be done with the zombies.  The most popular suggestion, of course, was ‘elect them as MPs; at least they won’t lie about their expenses’.

It was better than mass panic and nobody knowing anything for certain, of course, but John still found it all a little morbid.  He supposed it was because he and Sherlock saw the nasty end of it all – the mangled bodies and the low groaning and the crying relatives who said they’d just been going out to pick up a newspaper, really, and couldn’t anything be done to turn them back?  Please?

It had been one of those cases today, and John was drained of all energy by lunchtime.  He understood how the family felt, and he knew he’d be the same if Sherlock or his sister had been hurt, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.  Naturally, a lot of it did fall to him. The doctors handled as much of it as they could, but they were busy, and Sherlock and John were really here to help with the parts that anybody could do.

Needless to say, of course, Sherlock wasn’t particularly good at breaking hard news.

Here he came with the coffee, though, and took a seat opposite John to deliver it.  John couldn’t be angry with him for a fault he was very open about having, after all.

“Coffee,” he said uselessly.

“Cheers.”

“You could go home to rest if you liked, you know.”

John pulled a face, gulping back a few mouthfuls of his coffee.  “I’m not tired.  It’s just… you know.  It’s hard work, telling people things they don’t want to hear.  It’s not easy.”

“Leave it to the doctors.”

“They’ve got enough on their plates already.”

“So have we,” Sherlock insisted, but the truth was that the amount of assistance they could offer was quickly drying up.  Everything Sherlock had managed to work out was just standard logic that anybody could come up with given enough time. Zombies were congregating in dark alleys and around farms and places where there was easy access to meat, and were easiest to kill if you could prevent them from feeding for a few days and wait until they slept to recover energy.  That was it.  Now they were just… well.  _There_.

“It’s how they’ve asked us to help.  It’s alright; I’m alright.  It’s just hard.  That’s all.”

Sherlock hummed quietly, finally picking his own coffee back up to start drinking it.  John suspected he was trying and failing to think of something nice to say, so he didn’t interrupt his thinking - just let him get on with it in the silence as he drank his own coffee and slowly gathered himself together again.

Of course, Sherlock couldn’t stay silent forever.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be willing to sit in the lab again.”

John groaned quietly, leaning to rest his head on the table.  “I really think the doctors are going to stand the best chance of catching any leads before we do, Sherlock.  I know you’re good at it, but… God, it’s just…”

“Fine.”

“I mean.  You could go and do it if you wanted.  I could help the doctors.”

“No.  We’ll carry on as we are.”

This wasn’t the first time Sherlock had rejected the idea of splitting up recently, and John was starting to notice the pattern.  “Are you sure?  We could probably get more done that way.”

“This is not the time to be dividing our efforts.”

“What, then?”

“We can continue to help the doctors, as you say,” Sherlock said, though he didn’t seem keen, “or we can go out and hunt a few of them down.  More exciting, I suppose, but I doubt Mycroft will let us get away with that without some kind of speech about unnecessary danger.”

“Has that ever stopped us before?”

Sherlock smirked faintly.  “Then the hunt is on, I suppose.”

“I'm sorry - Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson?”

John turned, looking at where the voice had come from.  The canteen was empty save for them, so it could only be the mousy-looking assistant at the door.  “Can we help you?”

She smiled faintly.  “I thought it was you.  There’s someone who’s asked to see you.”

Sherlock frowned, taking over the conversation as he often did.  Of course, John didn’t mind that in the least, particularly today.  The last thing he felt like doing at the moment was having a chinwag with a random assistant, even if she seemed perfectly nice.  “Who?”

“The new director of research.”

“ _Who_?”

 

“I wasn’t even expecting it, really,” she said, tone as sweetly excitable as always, and took a moment to cradle her predictably pink mug between her hands to warm them.  “They were just asking who knew about… you know, zombies… and I’ve always kind of had a special soft spot for horror, in a way.  Toby and I love it.”

“You watch zombie films with your cat?”

Molly’s face lit up a little.  “You remembered his name.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said with a note of confusion, as though expecting him to forget was abjectly ridiculous.

“That’s brilliant news, though,” John cut in, hoping to nip the awkwardness in the bud.  “It’s good of them to recognise your, er… specialist knowledge, and that.”

“Well, it’ll be nice to have the extra money.  Nice to be able to really _help_ with it all.”  She paused for a moment, smile fading slightly.  “To be honest I think the only reason I got it was because nobody else wanted the job. I sort of fudged the intervew.”

“No,” John began to insist, but Sherlock was already talking.

“It’s a lot of responsibility.  The kind of position that will go down in history if you make the wrong decisions.”

John shot him a look, turning back to Molly with a smile he admittedly had to force a little after that.  Was that true?  If she couldn’t direct the research correctly would Molly Hooper’s name go down in history as one of the bad guys?  It put things into an odd sort of perspective.  “You’ll be fine.  You know what you’re talking about better than anyone, it sounds like.”

“In any case I’ll be able to advise you if you’re heading for _complete_ disaster,” Sherlock said absently.  It might have earned him an elbow to the ribs if Molly hadn’t smiled like it was something wonderful.

“Thanks,” she said.  Maybe, John supposed, it’d comfort her to think that she couldn’t go too wrong without someone giving her a heads-up and a pointer in the right direction.  Admittedly it’d come along with a few poorly-masked insults, but Sherlock did at least mean well.  There was one thing they had in common, he supposed.

It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered what the chances were of setting them up together recently.  It’d make things easier, for one thing.  Every time he thought about it, though, it seemed like it’d be a terrible idea.  Why that was exactly he couldn’t articulate even to himself, but he felt it was best to just go with his gut on something like this.  After all – better not to hurt them both just to seal off his own problem.

“Listen,” John said eventually into the silence, “is there anything we can help you with?  We were just saying that maybe we’d go and hunt a few of them today seeing as there’s not much we can do here, but if you need us at all…?”

“No,” she said, putting her hot chocolate back down without even taking a sip.  “No, I don’t think so.  Today we’re just organising all our samples and making sure there’s a system in place for dating and categorising. It’s all been a bit of a panic and a fuss so far, and I just think it’s important for us to be able to catalogue it properly.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, which was about as close to praise as it seemed he was willing to get.

Of course, it was more than enough to please Molly.  “Great.  Well.  You two be very careful, then, and… bring us back some blood and tissue samples if you’re able, will you?”

 

“I’m not sure what I think about that,” John admitted, slotting his medical mask into his pocket as they headed out onto the streets.  “About Molly running the research team.”

“Mm,” Sherlock said, mildly distracted as he glanced at a missing person poster – probably working out whether they were alive or dead.  John didn’t ask.  “She’s enthusiastic.  Well-meaning, whatever that’s worth.  Not particularly good at leading, though.  Particularly not in a crisis.”

“I’ll have to ask Helen to keep an eye.  Make sure she’s not… you know. Looked down upon.  With her not even being from Jenner’s…”

“St. Bart’s commands a certain respect, doesn’t it?” Sherlock said, his attention back on the conversation again now.  “You shouldn’t need to ask _Helen_ to tell everyone to be nice to their new colleague.”

“Oh, yeah,” John agreed.  “But when they’re coming in to your place, to be your boss?  Isn’t it just natural for people to kind of… reject authority coming in from elsewhere?  That’s what it’s like in offices, and in my clinics, too.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I suppose not.”

They headed down the street in silence for a while.  John wondered if it would be considered condescending to suggest they hang around and help Molly out to make sure she didn’t get flustered. Probably, yes.  She just seemed very frail sometimes, he supposed, and he didn’t want to let her get to a bad point.

“Stop thinking, will you?  It’s distracting.”

“Sorry.”

He tried to just focus on the street around him, not even considering the ridiculousness of that statement anymore.  He was just used to Sherlock by now.  Maybe that, he thought, was the reason Sherlock had gotten those feelings for him in the first place.  Nobody else understood him in the same way as John did – well.  Moriarty had, but it wasn’t quite the same.  Or even remotely the same, in fact.

“Down here,” Sherlock suggested.  ‘Here’ was a back-street of shops that had been rarely used since the announcement of the bacteria spreading, and it seemed a reasonable city-centre space for the undead to gather – if you could call anything to do with them ‘reasonable’, he supposed.

“Alright.”

They headed down it, slow and careful despite the daylight.  They weren’t vampires, obviously; there was nothing about the daylight that stopped them from coming out, even if the atmosphere didn’t feel as tense.  People kept forgetting that, actually.  There had been a lot of deaths in the daytime.

“There’s one,” he said, suddenly spotting a slightly swaying figure at the back end of the street, leaning into the corner of the brick wall.

“Excellent.”

It took them a moment to start moving towards it, keeping their voices down and their footsteps light as they did so.  It was a fairly easy kill because of that.  John noticed this for the first time as he watched Sherlock gathering the sample they’d promised and texting the location of the body to the removal team.

“When did we get to be like this, eh?”

Sherlock looked up at him, unsure what he meant.

“Killing zombies,” John said.  “We just used to solve cases.  And now we’re… you know.  We hunt things.  It’s not like us.”

“Well.  Needs must, I suppose.”

John snorted quietly, taking a few steps away to pull back his mask and enjoy the fresh air again.  “Never thought you’d be saying that about killing zombies, though.”

“No,” Sherlock admitted, a healthy trace of amusement in his usually unchanging voice.  “Nor me."


	15. 20th November, 2012

John hadn’t thought about it much, actually.  It occurred to him that this wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten into a relationship almost by accident, as though nothing had really changed before and after the relationship status itself had come into being.  Maybe life with Sherlock and dealing with copious amounts of corpses – whether or not they were reanimated – meant you couldn’t really take ordinary life like most people did.

This wasn’t to say that he wasn’t enjoying spending time with Helen, of course, because he definitely was.  Helen was intelligent and reasonable, and she was involved with the entire zombie problem with the same amount of clearance as John was, which meant no awkward inability to talk about what they were doing in their day-to-day life.

They did, however, prefer to talk about things that weren’t work-related.  Telly, sports and life before the undead were very common options.  For some reason, so was Sherlock.  He’d held off on it for a long time, but had eventually felt compelled to tell Helen about Sherlock’s feelings for him, and he still wasn’t sure whether he was pleased or not to have done it.  On the one hand, it had been good to get it off his chest, and he liked having somebody to talk to about it that couldn’t really do any harm.  On the other, though, she now seemed to want to discuss the problem a _lot_.

“How’s Sherlock doing?” she asked, her face in the same usual sympathetic arrangement.  This was only the second thing she asked him, the first being how _he_ was.  It was almost beginning to make him feel like he couldn’t get any time away from Sherlock at all. Not that he felt like he desperately needed to be away from Sherlock, but didn’t everybody deserve that sometimes?

Of course, he didn’t say any of that.

“He’s fine.  Always fine.  Doesn’t really… Well.  Acknowledge I know, or act any differently most of the time.”

She knew this already.  It was more or less what he told her every time.

“Bless him.  I hope he’s alright, really.”

“He’s fine.  He was worse with Irene.”

“Maybe that was because she wasn’t around at all, and you obviously _are_ , so…”

“Well, I won’t be leaving, so it’s not much of a problem,” he reminded her.  Now that they’d discussed it for a few moments, he finally felt comfortable trying to move the conversation along in the hopes that she’d let him do it.  “Dinner tonight, then?”

She smiled, much more interested in this part of the conversation herself.  Why she kept bringing Sherlock up if she didn’t even really want to know was beyond him, but she was a compassionate person.  Maybe she just wanted to be able to know that _someone_ was asking after the emotional health of Sherlock Holmes.  “Absolutely, if you still have the time.  Do we have a table, or…?”

“Not yet,” John admitted, “but I can phone for one now, around seven, or if not you can come to our flat.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she said, tone mildly berating.  “Do you?”

“He wouldn’t mind,” John tried to insist, but she was shaking her head.

“He wouldn’t _say_ he minded,” she said, “but he’s just like everybody else, I’m sure.  He doesn’t want to see it rubbed in his face.”

“You know, I’ve had girlfriends around him before,” John said.  “He was only ever as short with them as he is with everybody else, except on very rare occasions.  I can tell when he’s annoyed about something.”

“It’s a bit different having a girlfriend over when he knows that you know.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is,” she said, lifting her bag onto her shoulder and heading towards the door of the lab with him.  “When you had them before at least he knew that you weren’t intentionally being cruel; you were only inviting them over to meet a friend.  Now you know how he feels it’s different.”

“I think you’re relying too much on the assumption that Sherlock is a normal person,” John said, tone pointed.  “Which he isn’t.”

“Oh, he pretends not to be,” she said, not in the least bit convinced.  “We’re all the same, really.”

“I don’t know,” he said, deliberately not committing to agreeing with her.  “It’s fine, though.  I’ll call around and get a table somewhere.  It’s easier now everyone’s terrified of going out on a night and being… oh, eaten, or something.”

She grinned, pressing the button to wait for the elevator and fishing around in her bag for her keys.  “Well, they say every cloud has a silver lining…” For a doctor, she’d turned out to be fairly scatterbrained, but John quite liked that.  The flat was always pretty disorganised, so he’d grown to be fairly comfortable with the idea that not everything had to have its place, and that you were bound to have to spend some time looking for what you wanted sometimes.  It was homier like that.  She was a very homey person.  Maybe that was why they’d settled into this routine so easily.

“I’ll send a text, anyway,” he said.  “I’ll let you know.”

“Good.  Great.  Around seven, you said?”

“As close to it as I can.”  The lift dinged quietly as it arrived on their floor, so he leaned forward to kiss her fondly on the cheek before she left.  “I’ll see you later tonight.”

“Bye for now.”

“Bye.”

He considered where he might find Sherlock, but as it turned out he didn’t have to look.  As though he’d been waiting for Helen to leave – which wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility, actually – Sherlock turned the corner and approached where John was standing, sleeves rolled up but not looking particularly busy.

“And?”

John blinked for a moment before realising he told Sherlock he’d gone to organise something as he’d left him in the lab.  “Oh.  I’m seeing Helen tonight, table-booking systems willing.  Around seven.  That alright?”

“I don’t see how it’d affect me,” he said bluntly, heading off in the direction he came again.  John picked up that he was supposed to follow, and did so with fast steps to catch up.  “I’ve been waiting for you to come back.  Mycroft wants to see us, apparently.”

Things had gotten a little awkward with Mycroft recently.  John couldn’t say for certain whether this was down to the general tension they always had developing at a natural pace, or whether Mycroft was annoyed at John for proving him wrong and not liking his brother, or whether Mycroft would prefer John not to know about his connection to Greg Lestrade, or maybe even a combination of all of them.  What he did know was that he didn’t like having to speak to the man anymore, but apparently it was unavoidable today.

“Oh.  Anything important?”

“I suppose we’ll see.  He’s waiting for us in the conference room.”

They headed down in silence, and John wondered how much of his and Helen’s conversation Sherlock might actually have heard.  Thinking back, the majority of their discussion, particularly about him, had been in the lab room, and surely he couldn’t have heard that?  Moments later, though, he realised that it was probably silly to be wondering.  They were adults, after all.  He could just… ask.

“Sherlock,” he said, pressing on a few moments later when his friend didn’t react.  “Honestly, would it bother you if Helen came for dinner at the flat?”

“In what way?”

“Well, just… you know.  In any way.  Would you be annoyed, or… hurt, or jealous?”

“Please.  I’m not a teenager.”

“No,” John agreed, trying to keep his voice patient, “but you are a person, and… I mean.  To be honest, I thought you’d be fine, but Helen was concerned you’d-”

“Helen’s opinion doesn’t interest me,” he assured him immediately.  “Do as you like.  Haven’t we discussed that nothing has to change?”

“We haven’t really discussed it at all,” John pointed out.  “Just… every now and again.  Very vaguely, so I can barely tell what we’re even talking about.”

Sherlock threw him a look, mildly annoyed.  “There isn’t a need to talk about it.  There isn’t a need to adapt anything.  We’re friends. There isn’t a single difference between then and now.”

“Alright,” John said, though really he couldn’t agree.  “Alright.  You know I’m just trying not to do anything wrong.”

“Just stop fussing, then.”

He sighed quietly, nodding vaguely.  “If you say so.”

“The last thing we need is for Mycroft to contribute his opinion.”

Maybe that was what it was about, then – being too close to Mycroft’s prying eyes to have a real conversation about it.  He made a mental note to ask about it later to be sure, even if he knew he was possibly just setting himself up to be snapped at.

“So.  No idea what this is about at all, then?” John pressed, following him down a flight of stairs.

“I could guess,” Sherlock said.  “Supposedly there’s been talk of emergency camps being established. Apparently the Tower of London is supposed to be preparing for refugees.  I imagine there’s going to be some kind of moving of people.  Not that I could tell you what it has to do with us, but…”

“Fair to assume that’s what he’ll talk about?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.”  At least he could get himself in the right headspace to hear about all of this, then – no big surprises.  Half the problem with living through a time like this and trying to be useful during it was that a lot of the things you heard just threw you off-balance for a while.  Could anybody reasonably find out that the rate of spread was increasing beyond the predicted level and react to that calmly, unless they were trained to do so?

Mycroft, of course, looked composed to the point of boredom as usual.  There had been a little more life in him recently, which of course John and Sherlock were putting down to this thing with Lestrade, but he still managed to be all business during these meetings.  As much as John didn’t like him personally, then, he had to admire that.   The man was good at his job – whatever his job actually entailed.  John wouldn’t like to have to describe it to anybody for fear of missing something out.

Besides, he didn’t like to think about exactly how powerful Mycroft was.  He’d said some pretty sharp things to him in the time they’d known each other, after all.

“I did say half past,” he said smoothly.

“Consider it a break,” Sherlock drawled, arranging himself and his mile-long limbs in the chair.  “What do you want?”

Give him his due – Mycroft didn’t waste any time.  Maybe he’d lost his patience after waiting longer than he’d expected to.

“You’ve heard, I assume, about the plans to turn various places in London into temporary residences and medical camps.  As you might have guessed, there are similar things elsewhere. York is the main one in the north, and apparently Cardiff has finally started mobilising the plans we sent them as well.”

“Oh, typical Cardiff,” said Sherlock, voice dry as anything, but Mycroft ignored the mockery.

“The reason behind this is that some places, particularly cities, are becoming difficult to manage as they are.  The plan is to evacuate certain areas, beginning with Norwich and Exeter, and I’d like you both to go and assist with that evacuation.”

“Which?”

“Both,” Mycroft said, turning his pen in his hand.  “One in each.”

John tried to decide how best to phrase what he was thinking, but Sherlock beat him to it with what sounded suspiciously like a kneejerk reaction.  “That isn’t the way we operate.”

“Your experience means that you’re both equally as useful in this instance,” Mycroft said.  “It’s better to spread our resources than to keep them together for sentimental purposes.”

“It isn’t sentiment,” insisted Sherlock, as if offended by the insinuation.  “It’s practicality.  John and I are equipped to work together.”

“I haven’t got the antibodies,” John elaborated, “and Sherlock doesn’t like people.”

“Yes, thank you,” Mycroft said, voice rich with sarcasm, “I wouldn’t have dreamed of being able to observe those things for myself.  The point is, they’re not the kind of flaws that prevent you from operating.  You _can_ work without one another, and in this instance I suggest that you do.”

“No,” Sherlock said.  “Send Lestrade, if you’re scrambling for another person.  Or is it _Greg_ , now?”

“There’s something to be said for protecting reall relationships over fantasy ones,” Mycroft said, which was so riotously unfair that John couldn’t prevent himself from snapping back.

“Not that you can tell the difference, apparently,” he said, voice hard with the irritation.  “The point is that we’re not on your payroll, Mycroft.  If you want us to go and help with these evacuations, then you can send both of us to the same place, or neither of us.”

“You’re rather defensive of him, for someone so abjectly uninterested.”

“I am not uninterested,” John said, fighting to keep a modicum of calmness.  “I am his friend.”

“Though apparently unattached in the sense we both know I’m talking about.  Will you be expecting me to send Doctor Taylor with you on this friendly jaunt?”

“I’m expecting you to act like a professional,” John shot back, “but it seems like that’s not something you’re capable of, despite it all.”

“Will you be sending us, then, or not?” Sherlock cut in.  Either he was bored of the argument, John thought, or he was embarrassed by it.  It was kind of sad that he couldn’t work out which it was.

Mycroft sighed, leaning back in his chair.  “You will insist on being uncooperative, won’t you?  Norwich, then.  You’ll leave tonight.”

“After nine,” John said.  “Either that or tomorrow morning.”

“The wellbeing of a city is not going to wait for your personal plans, Doctor Watson.”

“Either it _is_ ,” Sherlock said, “or it will wait indefinitely.”

It surprised John that he’d argue about this, actually.  If anything he’d have expected Sherlock to agree that John should cancel his date, but apparently he was trying his hardest to uphold his part of the ‘act as if nothing has changed’ bargain, and John couldn’t fault him for that.

“Nine, then,” Mycroft said stiffly.  “The train will likely be fastest, given the traffic.  Be at King’s Cross for no later than five minutes to nine.”

“Presumably we’ll be staying there a few days,” John said.  Well, if he wanted Mycroft to sound professional, then he’d probably be a hypocrite not to try and be a professional himself, and turning up unprepared for a long stretch of time wasn’t the best way to make an impression.  “How long do you think…?”

“Pack a week’s clothing,” Mycroft suggested.  “The hotel will presumably have laundry facilities, though you may have to run them yourself given that people are unlikely to be turning up for work.”  He sounded suspiciously annoyed about that, and John couldn’t help but wonder after the last time he’d ironed one of his own shirts.

‘Not recently’ was probably a good answer.

“If that’s all,” Sherlock said, standing up from his seat, “then I see no reason for us to sit and talk any longer.”

“Always a pleasure, dear brother,” Mycroft said.  “Five to nine.”

“Yes, yes,” said Sherlock.

They both knew it’d be nine on the dot that they arrived, of course, and that nobody would say a word about it.


	16. Later on the 20th November, 2012

Maybe it was irresponsible to still see Helen on the night he was meant to be going out to Norwich to help with this evacuation, but John felt it was his right to do so anyway.  After all, he’d be putting himself in danger when he left tonight, and if the worst happened it’d be awful to think that they hadn’t seen each other on the last night they had the chance to.

Besides, they’d already made the plans.  Nobody had to know that he hadn’t actually made the reservation until after he knew about the trip.

“You’re sure you don’t mind packing your stuff up on your own?” John said, finally ready to head out to meet Helen.  “Though I suppose you can ask Mrs. Hudson if you get stuck.”

“I am capable of packing clothes,” Sherlock said – though John had seen his past attempts and wasn’t so sure.  “Go away. You’ll be complaining later if you don’t get a full hour or so with her.”

Charming.

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“No later than half eight, or I’ll be forced to tell Mycroft we’ll be late, and I can’t be done with his fussing.”

“I promise I won’t be.  Text if you need me.”

“I won’t need you.”

With that, he headed out to the street to hail a taxi, still wondering exactly how honest Sherlock had been about the whole business earlier.  After the blow-up there’d been about him seeing Helen in the first place all those weeks ago, John couldn’t really imagine there was no animosity there whatsoever.  The more time he spent thinking about it, actually, the more he supposed Helen must be right.  Maybe Sherlock _did_ hate it every time he brought a girlfriend.  He'd never talk about his feelings to let John know if he did.

Arriving at the restaurant, however, distracted him.  He didn’t want Helen standing on her own outside at a time like this, so he stayed in the cold himself until her taxi pulled up where his had been only minutes before, and waved at her with a light smile.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“You’re very kind.”

“Shall we head straight in?”

“Gosh. All this rush.”

He smiled sheepishly as she took his arm, heading in to wait at the designated area.  “Actually, there _is_ a bit of a rush.”

“Oh, dear.  What’s happened?”

“We’re being sent away tonight.”

“ _Tonight_?  Where to?”

“Not sure if I should say here,” John said, “but I’ll tell you later.  Apparently we’ll be able to make ourselves useful there, so… there’s that, at least.  Just a bit frustrating for it to be so last-minute.”

“I’ll say,” she said.  “What a shame.  I was hoping we’d get a nice long night together.”

John smiled, pleased that he could still be warmed and made happy by something as simple as that sentence.  “Me too,” he assured her, “but apparently it’s not to be.  I’m under orders not to be here any longer than an hour or so.”

“Whose orders?”

“Sherlock’s,” John admitted, “but dictated by Mycroft, really.  We’re meant to be at the station for nine, so…”

“Our poor date,” she said.  “All neglected.”

She was joking, but there was a note of genuine disappointment underneath it.  He hated that – hated having to come in here and tell her he only had an hour of his time to give her.  That wasn’t good for either of them.  “I know,” he said.  “I’m sorry.  Apparently it’s fairly urgent.”

“I understand,” she said, though he couldn’t be sure that she did.  “You and Sherlock both, then?”

“Me and Sherlock both.”

They waited in silence at the reservation stand, which was unusual.  Most of the time they had plenty to talk about, and John couldn’t help but wonder whether it was the annoyance of the clock ticking on or the pressure of filling up the time with important things to say that was preventing them from talking this time.  Thankfully, it got a little better as they reached the table.

“Best leave out the starters, then,” she teased.  It made him feel at least a little better to know that she could joke about it, if nothing else.

 

“You will be careful, won’t you?” she told him, her coat wrapped loosely around her shoulders as her taxi pulled up on the pavement.  “You’ll look after yourself, and look after Sherlock?”

“Of course I will,” he said.  “We’ll be fine.  Both of us.  I promise we’ll be fine.”

 

For once in their hectic lives, everything seemed to run to schedule.  Sherlock had actually managed to pack by the time John came in through the door, as planned. John only had a few more things to pack away before they could leave, and the taxi brought them to the station for nine on the dot.

“If it had come five minutes early,” Sherlock confessed, “I would have told it to wait.”

They saw Mycroft waiting in the centre of the station, composed and formal amidst all the frantic crowds trying to make their transfers.  Initially it surprised John that he’d come to see them off himself, but he supposed that maybe Mycroft was trying to make a point of controlling them personally.  He wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case – or if it was simply that it was hard to persuade any of his other staff members to deal with Sherlock.

“All ready, then?” he said thinly.  “I’ve compiled some information into this folder.  I suggest you make use of it on the train. We bought out an entire carriage for you and ensured you won’t be bothered.  Otherwise I only wanted to remind you that staying in touch and letting us know about your progress is not optional.”

“I’ll text,” Sherlock said.

To be fair to Mycroft, he didn’t let the annoyance show.  “A taxi will wait for you at the station.  The place is not holding up very well, as you can imagine; do try not to be alarmed.  It may be worth keeping something with you to use as a weapon in case you encounter one or more of them.”

“It’s quite overrun, then?”

“The cabinet were unspeakably slow making the decision to evacuate,” Mycroft explained.  “As things stand, I would not be surprised if the statistics were to show that there were more of them than us in Norwich.”

“Bloody hell,” said John.

“Exactly,” said Mycroft evenly.  “Ah – and before you leave.”

“What now?”

“Greg required me to pass on a message to you.”

This was surprising. Mycroft had pointedly avoided mentioning their discovered relationship before now, as much as Sherlock had been trying to bait him.  “Yes?” John said, curious.

“He told me to inform you that his attachment to me is genuine.”

They all stood in silence for a few moments, and John struggled to think of a time he’d been more awkward in his life.  Nothing really suggested itself.

“And why would Lestrade want you to tell us that?” Sherlock prompted.

“Earlier John insinuated that I couldn’t tell the difference between a real relationship and a fantasy one,” he said.  “Only apparently I _can_.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” John said, surprised that he’d been misinterpreted.  “I didn’t mean that.  I was more talking about… well, because you said... you know.  You told Sherlock that I had feelings for him, so that’s… an error you made.  That’s what I meant.”

Mycroft’s lips curled up into a could-be-malicious smirk.

“Ah,” he said.  “In that case, I suppose Greg retracts his statement.”

“Right.”

“Though it ought to be said that I’m not mistaken.”

John started at him for a moment, brow creased with a combination of annoyance and confusion.  “I think I’d know better than you do about that, Mycroft.”

“Of course you would _think_ so.”

“We’re going to get on the train,” Sherlock said bluntly, taking hold of the handle of his case again and beginning to head for the platforms.  “Try not to destroy London while we’re gone.  I’m fairly fond of it.”

“As you like,” Mycroft said.  “Have a safe journey.”

“Your brother,” John announced, as soon as they were out of hearing distance, “is one of the most infuriating people I’ve ever met.”

“And the most mistaken, apparently.”

 

The train was due to take just under two hours, which was more than enough time for them both to look through the file Mycroft had given them.  Initially it had seemed like an excessive gesture to buy out an entire carriage, but actually it proved genuinely useful as John finally put the file down and they began to talk about it.

After all, this was very sensitive information, and the public wasn’t permitted to hear it.

They were still discussing what might be the best course of action to take when the train pulled into the station.  It was strange stepping into a place John usually quite liked to see it so… well.  Disorganised.  The place was littered quite badly, and John wasn’t surprised that nobody else got off the train as they did.

“Shame,” he said.  “How long do you think it’ll take for us to get on our feet again, eh?”

Sherlock didn’t answer.

The taxi was waiting outside the station as planned, though.  The driver seemed to be filled with relief as they arrived, clicking open the boot and starting to speak to them as soon as they opened it.

“Hate sitting around in the city these days.  I know they can’t get in, but they don’t half give it a hell of a run-up.  Scares the shit out of me.”

“I bet it does,” John said, climbing into the back once their cases were securely in the boot.  “I hope you know where we’re heading, because nobody’s told us.”

“I do,” he confirmed, pulling away as soon as they were both in the back.  “I know exactly where we’re heading; don’t you worry.  You’re lucky that it’s in a fairly good part of the city still.”

“It’s nice, then?”

“It was.  I don’t know what it’s like inside. Folks forget they’ve got jobs these days.  Can’t say I blame them.  Look at the fucking state of it!  You’re lucky it’s dark so as you can’t see how bad it is.”

“Oh, we’ll see tomorrow,” John assured him.  “We’ll be here a few days.”

“Poor sods.  London seems like it’s faring alright, mind?”

“It’s not too bad.  They’re still around, of course, but…”

“Not like this, eh?”

“Not like this.”

“There’s one,” the driver said, pointing out a lone figure hovering on a street corner as they drove past it.  “They ignore the cars now.  Must have gotten used to them, or not being able to get in when they’re moving.”

“You see a lot of them out and about, then?”

“Floods,” the driver said.  “They’re everywhere.  We’re riddled.  I have to admit, we all just took the piss when the government released the statement.  We’d had ‘em days before that.”

“To be honest,” John said, “so had London.  They were just slow.”

“Typical bloody Downing Street,” said the driver, as unaware as the rest of the country that it was more Mycroft than David Cameron running the country these days.  “Mind, I suppose there isn’t anyone prepared for this sort of shit.  Can’t waste time coming up with plans for a bloody zombie attack until it happens, can you?”

“Apparently not.”

They pulled up outside the hotel a few minutes later, and sure enough it did seem like quite a nice place.  Maybe that was to be expected, though. Mycroft probably wouldn’t even be able to think of anywhere cheaper.

“Thanks very much,” John said.  “You’ve already been paid?”

“I have,” the driver confirmed, but spoke up again to halt them as they started climbing out.  “Can I… can I just ask you something, quick?”

“Of course,” said John, happy to spare a while longer for someone who’d ben as friendly as this man had.  “Ask away.”

“There’s been rumours of evacuation, like.”

Sherlock and John shared a look, considering.  Well, you couldn’t keep it a secret in the place it was happening in, John supposed.  The plans must have been flying around for at least a week, and people would have been telling their family and friends, and theirs in turn.  No wonder this man had heard a sniff of it.

“Is that what you’re here for?  To help run that?” He only gave them a moment before pressing on, “I know you probably can’t say if you are.  It was just with it being a government booking, and you not seeming like normal politicians, and… oh, I don’t know.”

“Did you want to ask us something?” John prompted, not entirely sure how Sherlock would take that question.  After all, Mycroft often stressed the need for being secretive, and you could see why, but Sherlock had never been particularly connected to his brother.  Maybe he wouldn’t care in the least that John was behaving in a way Mycroft wouldn’t like.  “Off the record, I mean.”

The taxi driver looked relieved.  “I didn’t want to pry, but… we’ve got a son and a daughter.  Little kids.  They’re frightened – I mean.  We all are, but they don’t understand, and if this evacuation camp is going to be rough living…” He shook his head, struggling to say what he meant.  “We’ve managed to stay safe here for this long.  Do you really think these camps are the right idea?”

John glanced at Sherlock, who didn’t seem like he was about to speak up.  He’d been fairly quiet for the entire journey, really; that being said, he didn’t particularly like random conversation with strangers, so John doubted he should be surprised.  He turned back to the driver.  “They’re almost hoping that not everyone is going to want to come along,” John admitted, considering what he’d read about the numbers they were expecting to be able to handle, “but if you’ve got the chance, do it.  Leave.”

“You think?”

“They’ll do an initial evacuation and get out as many people as they can.  A few weeks later they’ll come in and it’ll be by force, not choice.  If you manage to hide through that, this will be a lost city until all the undead have been wiped out.  Chances are there’ll be no food and no safe places to go.  If you want to be in any sort of comfort, go with the first wave while there are still places left.”

The driver nodded, drinking it in.  “Okay.  I get it.”

“Alright.  Off the record,” John reminded him, getting a fervent nod in return.  “Good luck.”

“And you,” he said.  “Look after yourselves, the pair of you.”

They watched him drive off, safe in the open, well-lit air outside the hotel.  Sherlock finally decided to speak up, having waited a while to phrase the sentence before he let it out.

“Why did you tell him that?”

John looked up, trying to see if he’d missed some kind of ‘don’t’ signal from Sherlock when he’d scanned him before.  No – he didn’t seem angry.  It was just curiosity.

“He asked,” he said simply. “He had a family and he wanted to do the best to look after them.”

“And you couldn’t have left him to work out for himself?”

“Not when I have information that could stop him from staying here only to be shifted on a few weeks later, no.”

Sherlock considered this, keeping quiet again to let John do the talking as they entered the lobby and headed up to the reception desk.  “Sherlock Holmes and John Watson,” he announced.  “Our rooms should be booked already.”

 

“One room,” John said blankly, still standing in the doorway.  “One room, and one bed.”

“Evidently he’s trying to be funny,” said Sherlock, finally stepping into the centre of the room to get a better look around.  “We can always ask for another room at reception.”

“Yes, and who’s going to pay for that?” John said.  “Have you seen this place?  Christ.  I’ll just… go on the sofa.  I’ve slept in worse places.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, John,” he said, planting his bags at the foot of the bed.  “If we’re mature enough to share the room, then surely we’re equally capable of sharing the bed.”

John cleared his throat, unsure how to phrase what he was thinking.  “I don’t think that’s what people usually do.”

“And you think people _usually_ come to assist with the evacuation of a city thanks to a zombie bacteria problem, I suppose.”

“No, but this is a little bit different.  It’s fine.  The sofa is fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Sherlock insisted.  “You need to be well-rested, and you won’t be if you’re sleeping on that.”

“It’s only a few days.”

“We don’t know that it is.  Look – I’m not going to attempt to put on some kind of sexual advances, and neither of us snore or flail around in our sleep.”

“How do you know I don’t flail in my sleep?”

“The bed creaks when you move, and it doesn’t often creak.”

It occurred to John that he probably ought not to bother asking questions like that of Sherlock now.  It wasn’t as though he was an ordinary friend making assumptions. It was all things he’d thought about in advance.  He tried not to consider the idea that Sherlock had actually asked Mycroft to do this, because… well, no.  Sherlock wouldn’t do that.

“Well, we’re not going to tell Helen about it.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes, and John realised that he couldn’t actually work out which of them was being childish.

 

With it being so late now that they’d finally arrived, they decided that bedtime should be as soon as humanely possible, thanks very much – especially seeing as they’d be up early in the morning.  Until that point it was much like spending time in the flat on an evening, weaving in and out of each other’s lines of sight as they got ready.  Admittedly it was usually their kitchen that they met up in and not the bedroom itself, but even so it didn’t feel much different to the usual routine.

Getting into bed itself, of course, was a completely different story.

It felt like he was a ten-year-old boy again, sharing the bed with his cousin when his mother hadn’t anywhere else to put the kid, and anyway wouldn’t it be good fun having a sleepover, Johnny boy?

It had not been fun.

Sherlock, at least, was stiller than his little cousin had been all those years ago.  He was very composed and calm, maybe already lost in a world of thought inaccessible to somebody as ordinary as John.

“Goodnight, Sherlock,” he said, doubting that he’d get a response.  However, the sound did stir him, and he glanced sideways as John settled himself to sleep too.

“Goodnight, John.”

Bizarre, yes – but in an odd way he didn’t care to confess to, it also felt strangely comfortable.  Despite that comfort, though, he could tell already that he was going to struggle to sleep.  The sheets were great, and he wasn’t bothered by the presence in the bed beside him; he’d long since gotten used to sharing, even if he didn’t usually share with a best male mate so much as a girlfriend.

“Still awake,” Sherlock noted a while into the night.  It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah,” John said.  “Not sure why.”

“I can move if it helps.”

“You mean… what, out to the sofa or something?”

“Would that help?”

“No, no,” John insisted, turning to face him slightly.  It didn’t really change anything, as Sherlock was lying there with his eyes closed.  If he hadn’t just spoken, John would swear he was fast asleep.  “No, it’s not that.  I don’t know.  We’ve got a lot of responsibility here.”

“You’re thinking about the taxi driver,” Sherlock guessed.

“Kind of.”

“We’re making the best of it.”

“Are we?”

Finally, Sherlock opened his eyes and glanced over.  “Yes,” he confirmed.  “We are.  It’s slow, but there are procedures in place at the very least.  They’re working on a cure on the off-chance.  Molly is heading up the research team so that we can know as much as possible about its origins.  People are going to be moved out of places like these.”

“And that’s enough?”

“It will do,” Sherlock decided.  “It’s something.  The country is surviving.”

“I suppose.”

He turned to lie on his back again, staring up at the ceiling.  The place was very modern, so there were no ornate carvings to get lost in or anything of the sort – just plain, smooth white.

“You worry too much,” Sherlock told him.

“Sounds strange coming from you.”

“Usually nobody pays enough attention to what’s going on around them,” he explained.  “These days there’s too much of it.  Panic.  It’s not helpful to anyone.  I can’t do anything with panic; I can’t use it.”

“But there’s not just you working on it this time,” John pointed out.

“No,” he agreed.  “Panic is useless in any case.”

“People can’t help being frightened of this kind of thing, I suppose.”

“Are you frightened?”

John thought about it for a moment, summing it all up and finding it surprisingly hard to admit, even to himself.  “Yeah,” he said.  “I am, actually.  I think I really am.”

As long as it had taken for John to speak, it took even longer for Sherlock to reply, but John understood why that was when he finally got to hear what Sherlock had decided to say.

“Come here.”

“What?”

“Come here, will you?” He paused.  “Just closer.  I’m not encouraging you to…”

“I know,” John cut him off quickly, preferring that he didn’t hear it.  “I know that’s not what you meant.”

A few moments later he shuffled sideways obediently, still leaving a fair distance between them.  After all, there was only so far you could go to oblige someone.  “Alright?”

“Alright,” Sherlock said.  And then, a few moments later: “They won’t get you.”

“Zombies?”

“Yes.  They won’t get you.”

“I know.”

“I won’t let them.”

“I know,” John repeated, but softly.  It wasn’t often that Sherlock came out with something as careful and well-meant as this, after all, and he didn’t want to crush his efforts by being harsh and snippy about it.

Sherlock shuffled, clearing his throat slightly as he closed his eyes again.  “Well, then, sleep.”

And oddly enough, John found that he could.


	17. 21st November, 2012

The taxi driver had called it a ‘fucking state’, as John recalled, and that seemed pretty accurate in the daylight.  At some point, they had clearly given up on clearing the streets.  There was not only rubbish and natural waste like leaves and dust to be lightly unsettled by the wind; the corpses of half-eaten cats and pigeons settled in awful bloodstains on the pavement every now and again, and there were plenty more bloodstains besides.

“Awful,” John said.

“Only as bad as London,” Sherlock disagreed, taking a few steps away to look out across the rest of the street.  “Only people are still trying in London.  If street cleaning stopped, the same thing would happen.”

“Sherlock, it’s deserted.”

“By mutual agreement.  They haven’t all died,” he pointed out.  “There are people here.  They simply aren’t leaving their homes.  We’re here to fix that.”

“So you don’t think it’s sad, seeing the city like this?”

Sherlock glanced back at him.  “Mess can be cleared.”

“It’s just a shame.  That’s all.”

“Would ingesting rotten meat cause them any trouble, I wonder?”

Evidently there was no use in getting Sherlock to try and feel sorry for Norwich, so John followed his train of thought instead, trying not to feel like some kind of obedient assistant switching subjects at his leisure.  They were equals, after all. Sherlock was undoubtedly cleverer, and John would never seek to argue otherwise, but that didn’t mean he was the _leader_ , particularly.

If John chose to follow sometimes, it was purely for practical purposes.  That was all.

“I suppose they have the same digestive system as we do.  I’d say it stands to reason it’d make them ill,” he said, aware that he was probably just telling Sherlock something he’d already thought of.

“Yes,” Sherlock said.  This wasn’t particularly enlightening, but John could understand staying quiet when you were trying to think.

“Maybe you could try it with one of the subjects at the Jenner.”

“I suppose it’d have to go through an ethics committee,” Sherlock said.  He often said that ethics committees were second only to religion in their desire to hinder the progress of knowledge.  Needless to say, as a believer in both religion and the importance of human rights, John usually disagreed with him, but in this case he pulled a face.

“For one of them?  Surely not.”

 “Well, they’re alive, aren’t they?  Presumably they feel pain.  Someone or other would complain.”

“Nobody’s going to stand up for them.  They’re just killers.”

“I’d like to agree with you,” he said, “but I don’t suppose you’d much like me to deliberately feed Helen rotten flesh, if she turned.”

“Point taken,” John said, “but we haven’t even managed to ID the first one yet.  Chances are nobody’s ever going to know who it is – or who it was before, I mean.”

“You really hate them, don’t you?”

John gave him a bemused look.  “I think we all do, Sherlock.”

“No.  You really hate them.  More so than anybody else we’ve spoken to.”

“What makes you say that?”

Sherlock looked out across the street again for a moment, frowning as he considered.  “ _It_ ,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“It,” Sherlock repeated.  “The pronoun you use is ‘it’.  Not ‘he’ or ‘she’.”

“Well, they’re-”

“Dead people made violent with hunger - that’s all.  You don’t call corpses ‘it’.”

“They hurt people, Sherlock.  They’re dangerous and they kill.”

“Like a soldier, I suppose.”

John looked at him for a few moments, trying to work out if that was supposed to be an insult, or just to make him think.  He settled on the latter – after all, Sherlock just insulted people outright when he wanted to do that.

“Are you actually trying to make me sympathise with them?”

“You were trying to make me sympathise with a city a couple of minutes ago.”

“Well, yes, but… This was a _place_ once; it was busy, and moving, and clean, and people _lived_ here.”  He looked up at Sherlock, trying to see if any of this was registering at all.  It didn’t seem to be.  “Why don’t you think that’s sad?”

“It’s reversible,” he said.  “Besides, it’s just concrete and glass.  If I have to care about something, it certainly won’t be a thing that can’t know about it either way.”

John considered reminding him he’d cared about John without him knowing about it, but changed his mind.  It’d be cruel, and there was no need to be cruel.

“Come on, then,” he said instead.  “Better not to be late on our first day.”

 

As it turned out, the first day was mainly made up of discovering that the Norwich staff weren’t particularly amused about London appearing to think they couldn’t organise their own evacuation.  It made for a cold welcome and a fair amount of tension – the kind of thing that never bothered Sherlock, of course, as it followed him everywhere, but it _really_ bothered John.

“You’d think they’d at least be grateful for _us,_ ” John grumbled, finding it all very childish at lunchtime as they sat apart from the other group to talk.  “It wasn’t our idea to come here.”

“Emotions are hardly logical,” said Sherlock, unperturbed and far more interested in his cup of tea.  “It doesn’t matter anyway.  You don’t have to like them, and they don’t have to like us.”

“It’s more pleasant if we do.”

“It’s not nearly as necessary to be liked as people assume it is,” Sherlock said, glancing over at the group of them all laughing together.  There wasn’t any desire for it in his expression at all.  This was one part of Sherlock he continued to struggle to understand, really.  Didn’t he want people to appreciate him at all?  Had he ever?  There must have been a moment at some point in his life, whether at primary school or during his O-Levels or at university, that he’d wanted to make friends.  Maybe it had faded, but surely it was impossible to go through your entire life without feeling that way even once?

Of course, he didn’t ask.  That wasn’t the kind of question you just flung at a man haphazardly.

“Even so.  If you weren’t here I think I’d go a bit mad.”

“Not literally,” Sherlock clarified.  “Though I’m happy to be of service, I suppose.”

“We should probably deal with the hotel room situation, mind.”

Sherlock gave him a querying look, so he elaborated.

“You know.  Get a separate room for one of us.  Separate bed.  Bit of space.”

“Was there a problem last night?”

John cursed mentally, sensing that this would be a conversation spent in a minefield.  Sherlock was very easy to hurt if you were close to him, John had learned.  Usually he wasn’t in a position to, but with something like this he was sure there’d be plenty of opportunities.  “No, no problem. Just… don’t you think you’d prefer to be…?”

“It makes no odds to me.”

“Well…”

“If you consider it to be a problem,” Sherlock said, meeting his eyes again, “or it offends you or makes you uncomfortable, then I’m sure it’s your prerogative to have it fixed.”

“It doesn’t offend me or make me uncomfortable,” John assured him.  “That’s not it.  It’s just… it’s not really what people do, is it?”

Sherlock pulled out his phone, already keying something in.

“Sherlock?  What are you doing?”

“Texting Mycroft,” he said.  “Evidently you _are_ uncomfortable, and I’m fixing it.”

“No,” he said, and in a fit of madness tacked on, “no, it’s fine.  It’s fine where we are.  I’d prefer that.”

Sherlock looked at him over the top of the phone, pausing in his texting, and locked the iPhone presently.  “If you say so.”

John left the table unable to decide whether he’d just been kind, unfair or just very well-manipulated.

Surely not, though.  Sherlock wouldn’t do that.

Probably.

 

It began tomorrow.  The plans were all in place, and this evening a street team was going out to knock on doors and advise people to begin packing up their most treasured belongings.  Sherlock and John’s work for the day, however, was done.  Being more used to being at the front line of things and carrying on with the job until it was finished, John felt a little odd sitting in the hotel restaurant while he knew this process was going on, but he supposed that was simply the nature of managing a task rather than taking part in it at a lower level.

“You’re stressed,” Sherlock pointed out. “And you don’t even have to wash the dishes tonight, or pick up milk.”

“Big job ahead of us,” said John.  “Lots at stake – and we’ll probably meet a lot of _them_ tomorrow, too.”

“We can handle the reanimated.  We’ve demonstrated that quite enough by now, I think.”

“It’s not about what you can do,” John said, “if they… you know.  Run out at you and when you're off-guard, or catch you trying to help someone.  There are so many of them here.  And it’s not only that; it’s just… you know.  Their attitude to us.  The trouble we might have with the public tomorrow.  Everything just added together.”

Sherlock picked at his still half-full dinner plate, apparently trying to come up with something to say.  He’d never been particularly good at trying to calm John down - maybe mostly because he didn’t often try.  “There’s no use letting it overcome you,” he said, as though John’s feelings were a choice that could be changed for practical reasons.  “It won’t help.”

“No,” John agreed.  “I know that.”

“Good.”

They sat in silence for a few more moments, John wondering if he ought to try to pretend to feel better now and whether Sherlock would buy it, before Sherlock spoke up again.

“You could have a bath tonight.”

“Pardon?”

“You could have a bath,” he repeated, as though this clarified things.  “Doesn’t that usually calm people down, supposedly?”

“I’m alright.”

Sherlock shrugged.  “Never mind, then.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, you’re…” John frowned.  “Are you saying I _need_ to have a bath?”

“What on earth would that imply?”

“That I smell, or something.  I don’t know.”

“It was only a suggestion.”

John narrowed his eyes at him slightly, not convinced at all by this and determined to work him out.  “I’ve already showered today.”

“I know you have.”

“You know?”

“We are sharing a room, John; I’m not entirely sure how you’d expect me to be oblivious of that.”

“Well, you _were_ asleep at the time.”

“My eyes were closed,” he corrected, and closed them again now.  “See.  I can still hear you.”

“Alright, smart-arse,” he grumbled, pushing his own plate away and finishing off his tea.  “You _looked_ asleep.”

“Because my eyes were closed?” His tone was deliberately tinged with amusement, leading John on to the inevitable snap reaction.

“Because you looked peaceful,” he said, too quickly, and hurried to elaborate.  “Because you were breathing slowly, and your body language was all restful and loose.  Because you looked asleep. How else am I supposed to describe it?”

“Peaceful,” Sherlock repeated.

“Yes.”

“And how long do you have to observe someone for before you decide they look peaceful?”

John stared over the table, thrown off as ever.  He had such a blunt way about him, and usually John’s no-nonsense nature could handle that, but when it came to making that kind of implication he was a little more easily flustered.  “I wasn’t watching you sleep, Sherlock.”

“Not for long, anyway.”

“Not at all!  I just kind of… when I got up, I just _glanced_ …”

“You glanced at me in my sleep.”

“That’s-!”

He was cut off by the sound of Sherlock’s quiet laughter, completely flummoxed for a moment until he realised that the entire thing had been a joke.

“You’re just winding me up?”

Sherlock smirked over at him, and it suddenly knocked John in the head that everything he’d been saying over the past few weeks, that nothing had to change between them, was true for Sherlock.  Maybe it really was because he’d already lived like this for a long time, wanting more from John than John was giving him.

It made him feel pretty guilty, actually.  A smile spread across his face all the same, relieved to finally understand what Sherlock was getting at.  That was no mean feat, after all.  “You wind-up merchant.  You don’t half get me worked up sometimes.”

“It’s very easy to do.”

“Apparently it is, yeah.”

“And it wouldn’t matter,” Sherlock said, glancing across the other side of the room – maybe to avoid eye contact, but probably just because another small group had come into the dining room and he wanted to see who they were.  Of course, John’s main concern was that he hadn’t the faintest idea what Sherlock had just said.

“What wouldn’t matter, sorry?”

“If you looked at me in my sleep,” he clarified, a few moments late as his attention stuck on the new diners.  John could practically see the cogs working, identifying their relationships and where they came from and what they did.  “It wouldn’t matter.  I wouldn’t read anything into it.  I’m aware you wouldn’t mean anything by it.”

“Oh,” John said.  “Well, good.”

“Then you _do_ look at me?”

“What?  No!”

But of course, he’d been had again, and Sherlock was already laughing quietly into his cup of tea.  Bastard.

 

The evening was spent fairly quietly, for a time.  John put the TV on in the background, though nothing much interesting was on. The comedy was all very samey these days, and had been long before there was only one big story to talk about.  Sherlock wasn’t paying attention, of course. He preferred to sit and think.  Today John followed suit after a while, just using the TV as background noise.

Why hadn’t he let Sherlock text Mycroft today?

After all, they were sitting here waiting to go to bed again now, and the awkwardness was mounting up in him.  He was a grown man, about to spend the second night in a row between the sheets with his best friend.  Not only that, but he was a grown man who’d had the opportunity to change it, and had refused.  Saving Sherlock’s feelings surely shouldn’t even register as that much of an issue. Sherlock was fairly hardy on this subject, or at least he appeared to be, and it was him that had offered to get on Mycroft’s case about in the first place.

Annoying, really.  He just wanted to relax.  Of course, he had managed to sleep last night, and it had been quite a good night's sleep too, but that didn’t mean he was going to be able to lie down and just sink as he usually did when he was alone, or with Helen.

Helen.  He probably should have texted her to let her know he was alright, but he couldn’t be bothered now.  His phone was all the way across the other side of the room, after all, and he was comfortable on the sofa.

Christ.  He really was turning into Sherlock.

“Today shook you up quite badly.”

He looked up after a few seconds’ delay, surprised that Sherlock had broken his own reverie, let alone sought to break John’s.  “Well, a little bit, yeah.”

“Is that what you’re thinking about?  You hardly ever think this much.”

“Yes, I do,” John said, mildly offended.  “I just do other things at the same time.”

“Well, more so tonight, then.”

“I’m alright,” he said.  “Nothing in particular.”

“Something relating to me, then,” Sherlock said, “or you wouldn’t hide it.  Or Helen, I suppose, but it’s unlikely.  You’d probably just tell me ‘Helen’ to get me off your case.”

“You’re very difficult sometimes.  You know that, don’t you?”

“So I’ve been told, yes.”

“You don’t think you could possibly switch off sometimes, just so I could have a bit of privacy before you just work out everything that’s going on with me?”

“There’s hardly any need for us to hide things from one another.”

“Just because I don’t _need_ to keep my personal thoughts private doesn’t mean I don’t _want_ to, Sherlock.”

“Yes, but why?  I think about you.  We’re friends and we live in the same flat; it’s hardly a big secret that it happens from time to time.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Are you thinking something unkind and you don’t want me to know about it?”

“It’d really defeat the point if I was and I told you, wouldn’t it?”

“No, then,” Sherlock said.  “You’d be far more ashamed.  You’re not a very good liar.”

“Not to you, anyway.”

“Not to anyone with a modicum of intelligence, I’d warrant.” He paused for a moment.  “Presumably you can lie to Helen.”

“I haven’t tried,” he said shortly, sitting upright more in the chair.  “Look, I know you don’t seem to like her, as you’ve never really liked any of the women I’ve gone out with, but that doesn’t mean you can just come out and say you think she’s stupid.”

“I don’t see why not,” Sherlock said.  “You know I think most people are stupid.  There’s no reason she’d be an exception.”

“Except that she’s a doctor,” John pressed, “and judging by her position, she’s probably more highly qualified than I am.”

“Qualifications aren’t in the least bit indicative of intelligence.”

“Got a 2-2 you’re not telling me about?” John snapped.  “I’d have thought you’d be all for academic success.”

“No,” he said, drawing the word out thoughtfully.  It wasn’t meant to be condescending, John thought, but that was how it sounded.  “The ability to pass an exam doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wired to do anything but _memorise_.  A good memory is hardly the only thing you need to be considered intelligent.”

“Except it’s not just a memory game,” John insisted.  “We do practical exams.  We need to understand concepts - know how to answer questions properly…”

“Oh, absolutely,” Sherlock said, tone padded with sarcasm.  “Do forgive me.  The woman can answer a question properly.”

“Don’t,” John said, giving him a proper warning look now in the hopes that he’d really understand that this wasn’t a route John was willing to go down.  “I’m telling you now.  Don’t.”

“All I’m saying is that I don’t understand why it matters to you that I don’t think she’s intelligent.  Why should my opinion matter, in any case?”

“It’s not that it’s your opinion,” John corrected, “so much as you’re saying unfair things about a person I care about.”

“So what you’re saying is that you don’t care about the vast majority of people I say supposedly unpleasant things about.”

“Not unpleasant.  Unfair.”

“No,” Sherlock argued.  “They’re not unfair.  It’s simple truth.”

“It’s not the _truth_ ,” John shot back.  “The fact that she doesn’t meet your astronomical standards doesn’t mean she’s not intelligent.  Why can’t you understand that?  The ridiculous number of hoops she’d have to jump through just to have you agree she’s clever. It’s ridiculous.  You’re not the one who gets to decide.”

“Then why should it matter what I say in any case?”

“Because it’s rude,” John insisted.  “It’s rude, and it’s unkind, and I care about her, and I don’t like hearing it.  Don’t you care about _that_ , at least?”

Sherlock seemed completely unfazed, giving him a look as casual as if they were talking about dinner or the weather.  “As far as I’m concerned it’s important that you understand what the person you’re dedicating so much of your time to is really like.”

“And you think,” John said, anger really rising now, “that you know better than me what Helen is like because you think she’s an idiot?”

“I think you’re paying more attention to her appearance and her personality than her ability to think, yes.”

“Oh, God forbid I should care about what my girlfriend’s _personality_ is like, Sherlock.”

“There are other important factors.”

“Like intelligence?” John retorted. “Yes.  Yes, it’s important that your partner is on a similar level to you. Maybe it is.  But in my opinion she _is_ , and it’s me that’s seeing her – and intelligence isn’t my first priority in any case.”

“Evidently not,” said Sherlock.

John didn’t even have time to decide whether or not to be cruel.  It just came out.

“Yes, evidently not,” he snapped, “or I’d be able to ignore _your_ shitty personality and I’d be seeing you instead, but I’m not.”  The red haze faded somewhat after that had come out, and he heard himself say it again in his head.  Angry as he still was, he could already tell it hadn’t been a kind thing to say.  “I’m not,” he repeated, slightly less sharp – as if that took the edge off it.

Sherlock looked at him for a few moments.  John thought he could see an inch of surprise in his facial expression before he looked away, but that was about it.  The rest was hidden in a sea of well-practiced nonchalance.  It reminded him of what Sherlock used to look like in the dark period he’d been missing Irene Adler, and that just wasn’t good news.

“I’m aware,” he said eventually, tone even and low.

They didn’t speak for a long time.  John still couldn’t bring himself to get up and go for his phone across the other side of the room, but maybe that was a good thing.  Annoyed as he was, he didn’t want Sherlock to think he was texting horrible things about him. Really, he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t, if Helen chanced to ask how he was coping being around Sherlock so much.

“Bed?” he managed eventually, when it seemed late enough.

“Yes,” was all Sherlock said.

John had the distinct feeling he might have made things difficult for himself, but he still couldn’t bring himself to apologise, even as he climbed into bed and saw that Sherlock wasn’t even trying or pretending to sleep.

“Goodnight,” he said, and waited a long time for a response before giving up and trying to get some rest.


	18. Early on the 22nd November, 2012

When Sherlock’s phone rang in the middle of the night, John was tired enough to ignore it.  He would have done just that, too, if he hadn’t been interrupted.

“John.  Phone.”

“It’s _your_ phone.”

“Yes.  Go and answer it.”

“No.”

Of course, it kept ringing.  Nobody phoned for no reason in the middle of the night, so they weren’t about to give up now.  John stood his ground, though, right up until the moment Sherlock prodded his leg with his foot. It must have been sticking out of the blankets or something, because it was bloody _freezing_.

“ _John_.”

“For goodness’s sake! It’s your bloody phone, and it’s bloody stupid o’ clock in the morning, and _what_ , Mycroft?”

“I’m surprised you managed to read the caller ID given how very asleep you sound, John.”

“And I’m surprised you didn’t withhold your number,” he snapped, “and I don’t care.  Just tell me what it is. And stop phoning in the middle of the night.”

“I didn’t phone _you_ this time, I’ll have you notice.”

“You knew he’d make me get it, and we’re in the same bloody hotel room anyway, no thanks to you.”

“Yes, I thought you might like that.”

“If you don’t tell me what it is I’m going to hang up and throw the phone out of the window.”

“If you really think that would prevent me from contacting you again, John, then be my guest.”

“ _Tell me_.”

“Make him tell you,” Sherlock contributed unhelpfully from the bed, half-asleep still.  John was a mite amazed to see him not in full consciousness for once.  The last time that had happened, he’d been drugged, so it was hardly his fault.

“Very well,” said Mycroft – and John knew he was stalling, the bastard.  “There have been reports of a small outbreak in the north of France, so I’m required to go and deal with the implication that it was our fault.”

“And why exactly did you need to tell us this at whatever time it currently is?”

“Because that’s when I’m leaving,” Mycroft said snippily.  “Immediately, and I’m taking Detective Inspector Lestrade with me.  As such, if you need to contact anybody in London, I advise you make it Doctor Hooper or your friend Helen.”

“My _girlfriend_ Helen, you mean.”

“Well, yes,” Mycroft said, in the tone of voice you’d use with a toddler.  “In any case, that’s who there is to contact should you need anything.  I don’t know how long we’ll be gone.”

“Did you really phone us in the middle of the night to tell us that?  You couldn’t have faxed the hotel, or phoned from France at a more decent time?”

“Perhaps you’re forgetting,” Mycroft said, “but Sherlock is family, and I do think it’s rather customary to inform family when you’re setting off to be potentially eaten by the undead... Or worse, the French press.”

“You’re always going places, but fine.  Fine.  Message received, loud and clear.  We can all get on with our lives now.”

“Tell me, John.  This friend Helen of yours.”

“ _Girlfriend_.”

“Does she know you’re sharing a bed with my brother?”

“Does Greg know he’s sharing a bed with a complete and utter cu-”

Unfortunately, Mycroft hung up before he could complete the obscenity, but at least it got a low, rumbly chuckle from the still half-asleep Sherlock.

“Yesterday I said you were easy to irritate,” he said, spreading out catlike across the mattress.  It took a lot for John to keep from telling him ‘that’s my space’, well aware that this would just be rising to it even further.  “I was very right, wasn’t I?”

“Shut up,” John said, “or I’ll throw this at you.” It wasn’t said harshly, though.  Being angry at one Holmes brother had pretty much relieved him of all the tension he felt directed towards the other, and apparently Sherlock was over the cruel thing he’d said yesterday too.  If not, he was hiding it very well – though he had to accept that this wasn’t unlikely.  Well, he’d just have to be kinder than usual tomorrow to make up for it.  “Don’t you want to know what he said?”

“Oh, he’s probably off to wrestle with some spread of it worldwide.  It was only a matter of time before it happened.”

John glared at him, putting his phone back down on the table before climbing back into bed.  Just as John had noticed, he was taking up far too much room, but there was at least enough space to lie still and straight.

Small mercies, and all that.


	19. 22nd November, 2012

It reminded him of the war.

People were shouting from every side of him, just as they had when grenades or the like had been thrown in Afghanistan, only here the word was ‘mask’.  They repeated it over and over.  “Mask!  Mask!” as though you hadn’t heard the first time and weren’t already frantically pulling it down over your face.

“John,” Sherlock called back, voice harsh in the way it only was when he got _really_ desperate.  “Mask.  Now.”

 _I bloody am_ , John thought, but he’d already pulled it down over his face, and it seemed petulant to shout back ungratefully in the middle of what could really only be described as a crisis.  By the sounds of things, there weren’t just a few of them cutting them off from their exit.  A _few_ weren’t enough of a problem that the IgZ positive team members – like Sherlock, for example – would call on the rest of them, who were IgZ negative, to help.

“Ready,” called Ellen, standing bravely at the front.  “They’re breaking through now.”

“Christ,” said John, quiet behind his mask to try and retain a scrap of dignity.  He found himself scrambling with his eyes for Sherlock in the crowd and panicking when he couldn’t spot him – panicking when they burst through and suddenly chaos and mayhem and violence replaced the order they’d somehow managed to keep with the undead until now.

 

He’d forgotten, he thought, how much blood you saw in the field.

After that, he didn’t remember much.

 

He didn’t catch sight of Sherlock until he woke up, but at least then he was right there with him, lolling to one side in a snatched moment of rest.  John decided not to disturb him immediately, even if he thought it might make him irate. The man was obviously exhausted, and that wasn’t a healthy way for anybody to be in this kind of environment.  That being said, was _he_ even healthy?  He had no memory of what had happened, and despite being awake that meant he had to assume the worst.

He glanced at his wrist, feeling something heavy on it, and saw two fabric bracelets clamped on by metal.  One was green with those notorious black letters embroidered into it – ‘IgZ N’ – and the other plain white.

John could only hope they’d gone for the standard symbolism, and that white meant ‘clear’.

After twenty minutes or so, he couldn’t wait any longer.  Maybe it was selfish, but he convinced himself that Sherlock could have been asleep for hours now while he’d still been unconscious.  He reached to pat his shoulder and then his hair, gentle and unconsciously fairly intimate.  It took a while for Sherlock to wake up, so he carried on doing it, prompting him quietly after a while.

“Sherlock.  Wake up.”

He did stir at the sound of his voice, turning slightly into his hand and sitting up with a light frown.  Sherlock didn’t open his eyes for a few moments, though. Alright, so maybe he really was tired after all.

“John,” he said, a few moments after his eyes opened.

“That’s me.”  Well, what else could you say to that?

“You’ve been asleep for…” He shook his head, frowning a little deeper and blinking a lot more than usual.  Noticing these details made John feel like he’d learned a lot from Sherlock himself, but maybe he was just paying a lot of attention.  Sherlock did that to you.  “What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” John admitted.  “But I also don’t know what happened, so you’re going to have to tell me.”

Sherlock looked off, scanning the world from outside the windows.  They were in a hospital ward, John noticed.  He didn’t recognise it, so it must be the place in Norwich, and on a very scrapped-together ward that looked an awful lot like a World War One setup.  Maybe they’d already started evacuating everyone, and didn’t have the people to run an entire hospital.

“Sherlock?”

He shook his head abruptly, apparently not keen to talk.  “No.  Ask someone else.”

It was so unlike him to be like this that it knocked John aback a little.  Christ. What had happened out there?  “I’m alright, though?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, finally turning back to John.  “You’re fine.  Just… your head.  Some trauma. Nothing too serious, they tell me.”

“Oh, right.  Well… bloody hell.”

“Yes,” Sherlock repeated.  He still looked very pale, and didn’t speak for a few short moments afterwards until he finally managed to speak, sounding somewhat forced.  “John.”

“Sherlock.”

“You’re alright.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, concerned now and raking his eyes over his friend a few times, trying to work out whether he could say the same for him.  “Yeah.  I’m fine.”

“Good.”

There was another long silence, uncomfortable only because John couldn’t tell if Sherlock was leaving it on purpose or not.  He couldn’t read him at the moment. He was too still, and too unlike himself.  “Are you okay, Sherlock?”

“Just for a while,” he said in response, voice dull and directed down at the floor, “if it’s not any trouble, I’d like to hold your hand.”

It was such an odd request, but John didn’t have the heart to refuse it – not now, when he looked so defeated and had even actually _asked_.  For Sherlock, asking for something like that was admitting defeat.  It was mentioning the unmentionable, and today he’d done it anyway.

“Course you can,” John said, as though there was no other answer he could possibly have given.  Maybe there wasn’t, really.  “Give it here.”

He held his hand out, and Sherlock took it – didn’t snatch it or creep his hand towards it slowly as though it was something to be ashamed of.  He just took hold of it, squeezing gently for a moment but not letting go.  He didn’t make eye contact, though.  Apparently that was past him at the moment, and John didn’t press.

“Scared you?”

“Mm,” said Sherlock, non-committal.  Even though John couldn’t fully grasp him in this dazed, uncertain state, he at least knew what that meant.  It meant ‘yes’.

“It’s alright,” he assured him, tone soft and unchallenging.  Nothing he ever said to Sherlock was supposed to be part of a power struggle. Nothing was meant to degrade him, or emasculate him, or bring John out on top.  They weren’t like that.  Their relationship didn’t stand like that.  That was what people often missed about them, actually.  They misread it.  They thought that Sherlock was in some way the leader, and John the follower, but it wasn’t true.  They were equals, and you might even get Sherlock to admit that if you poked and prodded him enough, though he’d certainly tell you that he was more intelligent and observant than John before he gave his real answer. Really, all that was besides the point at the moment, and he refocused on talking to Sherlock.  “I was scared when you were hurt.  It’s natural.”

“No,” Sherlock said.  “Not the same.”

“It is the same,” John started, but Sherlock cut in again.

“It’s not the same,” he insisted.  “It isn’t.”

“Tell me, then,” he encouraged, feeling Sherlock’s grip tighten on his hand.  “I want to understand if I don’t already.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he told him.  “Come on.  I’m your friend.”

“Exactly,” Sherlock said, a little strained.  “You can’t understand.  You’re not…”

John rubbed the back of his hand with his fingertips gently, just trying to coax it out of him.  This wasn’t easy, and he hated it, and frankly he didn’t think sitting here with a head injury in hospital was the best time to be discussing it, but he’d take it as it came.  That was just how things had to work sometimes.  Things happened, and you dealt with them.  “Go on.”

“We’re in the right place, for you,” he started.  It was slow, but at least he was speaking.

“Mm.”

“Not for me,” he clarified, though the point was clear.  “For me we’ve still…” He cleared his throat, frowning hard at the floor still.  This wasn’t easy for him, and John tried to remind himself of that to make sure he understood what he was asking for here.  “There are still things we need to get to, and we haven’t.  And in any case, as I've said before. I don’t know that it would all be much use if I didn’t have my blogger.”

John smiled faintly, responding easily to Sherlock’s attempt at bringing humour into it, even if it wasn’t his natural reaction.  If Sherlock meant it to be funny, then he’d laugh.  It made him wonder why this entire thing had ever been a deal in the first place.  With anything else, John submitted to what Sherlock wanted or needed immediately.  If Sherlock said jump, John went ahead and did it. He didn’t need to ask how high, because they both just _knew_ , and anyway when Sherlock asked him to do something it often needed doing _fast_.

 _Mask_ , he remembered him saying.  _Now._

“You don’t understand,” Sherlock told him, which really meant ‘I can’t explain’.  John didn’t mind the harsher phrasing much, of course.  He was used to it.

“It’s alright,” he assured him.  “I think I’ve got it.  I know what you’re saying.”

“You don’t,” Sherlock said, and before John could disagree he spoke up again.  “If you knew what it was – if you knew what it was like – then you would…”

It broke John’s heart a little bit.  He couldn’t lie about that.

“Sherlock,” he said, not entirely sure what he was going to say next, and squeezing his hand instead of speaking blindly.  It bought him a few moments at least, even if Sherlock already looked like he’d said something awful.  “Sherlock, I don’t want to hurt you.  That’s never what I wanted.  It’s not something I can force.”

“I know that.”

“Just as long as you do,” John said.

Sherlock took a few long moments to speak up again, but when he did John understood why.  “You could try.”

“If I thought I could try, I swear I already would have,” he assured him, only able to hope that Sherlock knew how sincerely he meant it.  “If I could make myself reciprocate, or if I could somehow make myself gay, I genuinely think that I would, but I can’t.”

“It’s not as cut and dry as you think it is.”

“Sexuality?” John said, and waited for the light nod before he continued.  “I know.  But it is… well.  _Instinctive_.  I’d know, I think, if I liked men.  And I’m not the kind to hide it away, or push it down.”

“You can’t know that.”

“But I do, Sherlock.”

“But you don’t!” He looked up finally, infuriated both with himself and with John, and pressed on.  “You don’t know that.  The point of repression is that it represses.  You can’t possibly know that you’ve done it.”

It was a fair point, and well-made. Like every other person, though, John couldn’t apply it to himself even if he knew it could be true.  “No, Sherlock.”

“Prove it, then.”

This was going entirely the wrong way, and it was dangerous.

“I have a girlfriend, Sherlock.  I want to be your friend.”

“Of course,” he said, loosening his grip.  Before he could let go, though, John squeezed his hand again.

“I do,” he insisted.  “And if I ever do… you know.  Incline the other way.  You’ll be the first one to know about it.”

Sherlock didn’t reply, so John finally let go of his hand with one more squeeze – just gentle, of course.

“Alright.  Am I going to get to go back to the hotel tonight, or are they keeping me here?”

“I think they’d prefer you to stay here.”

“But I’d prefer to leave,” John pointed out, trying to get him to react somehow.  “So… I don’t know if you’re willing to help me back…”

Sherlock gave him a look, standing from the chair.  “Don’t be an idiot.”

For a moment John was an idiot and thought he was walking away, but then he saw he was gathering his clothes.  Well, at least being injured had some kind of positive influence.  He could get used to this.

 

The hotel room was beginning to feel like home already, but John supposed maybe that was an effect of being scared shitless earlier today, and waking up in a hospital bed in a place he didn’t recognise.  Anything you’d slept safely in before could start feeling like home the night after that – and oh, was he ever tired.

“I’d have that bath you mentioned,” John said, “only I think I’d fall asleep in it, and maybe drown.”

“Not particularly agreeable.”

“No.”

They looked at each other, at least capable of sharing amusement even if things were bound to be a little awkward after their earlier frank discussion, and carried on with their business as they got settled in.  Sherlock looked absolutely exhausted too, so maybe it was kinder to stay quiet and let him relax.

He was, after all, only human.  It was always worth reminding yourself of that, even when you were in John’s position of seeing it demonstrated often.

“I think we should go straight to bed,” he tried, conscious that Sherlock sometimes didn’t like to sleep after long busy days in favour of continuing to work, but today there was no need to worry. He only nodded and started undressing for bed.  “Alright.  Good.”

They stayed quiet after that, separating only when required to for the bathroom and the like.  It left John a lot of time to wonder what the hell had happened, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.  Sherlock didn’t seem like he was going to be persuaded, so John was just going to have to wait until he saw somebody else who had knowledge of it.  It hit him with a wave of guilt, too, that he hadn’t actually endeavoured to find out if anybody else had been harmed in the attack – or worse, killed.  Certainly he hadn’t had much time to check his priorities this evening, but he still felt bad, and as soon as they were both in the room it was the first thing he said.

“Everyone else,” he said, feeling it was better to make sure Sherlock knew what he wanted to talk about first.  “They’re… alright?  Nobody got badly hurt?”

“One down,” Sherlock said, as though it was someone he’d never met or heard of.  Of course, they’d only known them all for a day, and they hadn’t liked Sherlock and John, but it still seemed a little cold.  That being said, that was just his way.  “His name was Benjy, I think.  Fairly young.  No family.  Reckless.”

“Shame,” John said.  “And nothing else?”

“No other serious injuries.  Cuts and scrapes.  Some trauma, I imagine.  They might not sleep tonight.  Otherwise, no harm done.  We handled it as effectively as we could.”

John decided, seeing as this conversation was going so well, that he’d press his luck.

 “And me…?”

“No,” he said firmly.

Well, so much for that.  “I’m going to have to be told at some point, Sherlock.  I’d rather it came from you than somebody else.”

“No,” he repeated, slightly terser, so John gave it up again and went to sit under the covers beside him.

“Okay,” he said.  “I’m sorry.  Don’t tense up on me, please.”

“Let me check your head,” Sherlock said, as though this was some kind of bargain that would make it better.

John was, of course, more than willing to take that bargain if it would even out Sherlock’s mood.  “Alright.”

He leaned over, not even particularly bothered by the intimacy as Sherlock started combing his fingers through his hair lightly to find the wound.  Apparently it was a fairly small thing, as Sherlock circled the area of the wound with his finger to demonstrate.  “Would have traced the scar,” he said, “but it looks somewhat tender still.”

“Appreciated,” John said, because he wasn’t entirely sure what else _to_ say.

“Lie down,” Sherlock said after a while.  “I can’t see very well.”

Even an order like this seemed harmless to obey, so John did. He moved to lie down on his front, arms crossed to rest his head on, and let Sherlock carry on moving his fingers through his hair to assess the problem.  Sherlock was no medical man, which was really the reason John was around in the first place, but he knew vaguely what he was looking for, and after a few minutes he flopped down beside him.  It almost reminded John of the kind of sleepovers they’d all had between the lads at school when they were twelve and thirteen.

“It was worrying,” he confessed, at least managing to look at him this time.

“I know,” John said.  “But it’s alright.  Nothing to worry about now.”

“No.”

Seeing as there’d been quite a bit of intimacy directed his way, John reached across to smooth a bit of Sherlock’s hair away from his face, just with his fingertips.  It wasn’t a romantic gesture in the least – certainly not on his end, anyway.  Then he supposed it wasn’t entirely up to him, and felt a little bad.  “I’m sorry.”

“For something specific,” Sherlock said, “or in general?”

“General,” he clarified.  “I don’t like it.  I wish I could change it.”

Sherlock considered for a moment, and John gave him that time.  He wished he hadn’t, though, when he heard his friend speak.

“Let me kiss you, then.”

“What?”

“I know that you heard me,” Sherlock said, mildly berating, “and I do not intend to repeat it.”

John blinked, sitting up a bit as he tried to process the idea.  “Well… given what we’ve talked about today, Sherlock, could you… just tell me a bit about why you’d expect me to do that…?”

“You say that you want to try,” he pointed out.  “And it’s been a trying day, and I rather thought for a while I might have…” He cleared his throat and took a pause to gather himself and his sentence, but then pressed on as though he hadn’t stopped at all.  “Lost you.  It needn’t be a… sexual thing, or…”

“Well, I’d hope not.  Poor Helen.”

“Poor Helen,” Sherlock agreed, but his tone of voice wasn’t quite pointing in the same direction.  “Will you, or won’t you?”

“Sherlock…”

“It’s a simple enough question.  I don’t see that it would be unpleasant for either of us.  It need only be a… a comfort mechanism.”

John didn’t think for a second that a comfort mechanism was all that it was, but he didn’t correct him.  Instead, he approached it another way.  “Can I ask you something personal?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Have you ever… well.  Kissed anybody, before today?”

“I have tried to,” Sherlock said, voice tellingly stiff.  “The reaction was not as anticipated.”

“Okay.  So you didn’t…?”

“No.”

“Alright.”

He sat up a bit more, climbing back under the covers to try and wrap his head around the idea.  Maybe it wasn’t so crazy.  Then again, he did have one hell of a head injury at the minute. He probably wasn’t thinking straight.  Ha.

“And you’re sure you’ll be alright with it?”

Sherlock nodded once, sagely.  “I’ve considered it.  I know what it is.  Will be.”

“If I do,” John said.  “ _If_.  And you react badly later and you tell me I shouldn’t have, all I’ll be able to tell you is that you told me it was… a friendly thing.  Comfort.  Just being intimate, but not… intimately.  You know that?”

“I know that, John.  It’s not intended to be a weapon.”

“I’d never say it was,” he said, but knew he was safeguarding himself with a similar thing.  Telling Sherlock that he couldn’t _say_ he was hurt would hardly stop him from _being_ hurt, after all, and this certainly wasn’t the most unromantic thing he could do.  In fact, it was a bloody stupid idea, but he was tugged somehow to give Sherlock what he asked for anyway, and his gut felt like it knew what it was doing.  Sometimes, it was important to pay attention to that.

Sherlock shuffled a little closer to him.  “I may have to apologise in advance for not being well-practiced.”

“I understand,” John told him.  It felt like his mantra of the day – _I know, I understand, I get it, I feel the same_ , _I’m listening to you_.  “It’s alright.”

It happened slowly, but there wasn’t any tension there.  John looked at him briefly, their eyes met in an unusual but not uncomfortable way, and a few moments later they were closed and their lips mere meeting in the middle, soft and cautious and not entirely sure where the boundaries were.  Sherlock kissed like he observed – cautious in the sense that he was determined to do it correctly the first time, but also fairly vigorous.  They moved slowly, and it wasn’t at all rough, but there was a strength and certainty in the kiss that John… well.  For want of a better word, he quite liked it.

They came closer to each other after a few minutes, content to be nearer to one another if this was how they were going to spend the evening.  John found that it did feel very comforting and natural in a way he hadn’t been expecting, as though they ought to have been kissing to calm down after difficult times since the moment they’d met.

He couldn’t say how long they’d kissed for, but he’d guess at least half an hour before they pulled apart to lie close, looking directly at each other and completely absorbed.  It was John that broke the silence, as he recovered from the feeling first, and a sudden awkwardness grew, as though he finally remembered that perhaps he ought not to have done that.  “Okay?”

“Okay,” Sherlock agreed quietly, and he did sound much more settled.  In fact, he sounded positively happy, and surely that couldn’t be a bad thing regardless of the means they employed to get him there. Surely.

John was dizzy with half-baked thought by the time he drifted off, and barely noticing that their fingers clasped together as they slept. 


	20. 23rd November, 2012

The next day, he remembered and hated it immediately.  Clearly having a head injury really had addled him, because that kind of behaviour just shouldn’t make sense to anybody – well.  It was bound to make sense to Sherlock, who hadn’t the faintest idea about that sort of thing anyway.  Other than that, it was ridiculous.

 _He_ was ridiculous.  Poor bloody Helen.

It was over breakfast that he brought it up, fairly unwillingly.  Nobody ever liked to talk about this sort of thing, but John liked it least of all with Sherlock bloody Holmes.  It had to be said, too, that Sherlock seemed to be getting bolder by the minute.  A few weeks ago he’d never have dreamed of asking to be kissed or even anything along those lines, but now here he was perfectly capable of speaking up.

“I think we should probably have a discussion,” John said, “and then agree never to give ourselves anything like that to discuss again.”

“It wasn’t so bad, I didn’t think.”

“No,” John agreed, but realised that had been a mistake all of half a second later.  “I mean – not that it was… Not that you should read anything into that, or…”

“Then what _do_ you mean?”

He gave him an exasperated look.  He might someday find out if he let John finish, after all.  “I mean that it always means something.  You can’t take that out of it; it’s too…” He scrambled for the word, and thankfully Sherlock didn’t take the silence this time.  “It’s too wound up in it all.  Intimate.”

“Intimacy isn’t just…”

“I know,” John said, cutting him off even though it was hypocritical after what he’d just been thinking.  “I know it isn’t.  But it’s not right, so we’re not going to do it again, and we’re definitely not going to let Helen find out it happened.”

Sherlock took his time responding, maybe deliberately.  He sipped his tea and had another mouthful of cereal to pass the time, but John didn’t bite.  Interrupting this time would be losing.  “Nothing really happened, though, did it?”

“Not really,” John said, “but I don’t think she’d see it that way, and nor should she.”

“It’s not as though you and her are serious.”

“That doesn’t make it alright to hurt her, Sherlock.”

“And you think this would?”

“Of course it would.  It’s… You know.  It’s textbook hurting material.”

Sherlock smirked at the turn of phrase, irritating in his lack of experience and understanding.  It wasn’t really his fault, John knew, that he had never been given the opportunity to learn about relationships, but that didn’t make it any easier to come to terms with when it was an obstacle pressed up in his face.  “Textbook.  I don’t suppose Waterstones will have it?  Or Blackwell’s, more likely…”

“You know what I mean.  Look, just… don’t mention it to her.  Please.”

Sherlock pushed his bowl away, unfinished but apparently refusing to eat any more.  “Dirty little secret it is, then.”

“No; come on.  It isn’t like that.”

“It’s exactly like that,” Sherlock disagreed, tone flat enough that anybody who didn’t know better might believe he didn’t care.  “Fine, then.  Do you need a signed declaration?”

“Thank you,” John said, ignoring the attempt at snipping at him.  “I appreciate it.”

“I don’t,” said Sherlock, “but we’ve ascertained that isn’t the priority.  Helen will never know.  We don’t need to talk about it anymore.”

 _This_ , John wanted to say.  _This is exactly what I’m talking about.  It mattered to you and it’s hurting you that it doesn’t matter to me, and it was stupid of me and it was outright wrong of me, actually, and I should apologise, but even then that wouldn’t make it better, and nothing will unless I can ever give you it back._

“Okay,” he said.  It seemed neater, somehow.

 

They wouldn’t let him go back out to gather people, and naturally Sherlock outright refused to leave his side. Instead, then, they ended up dividing up numbers that somehow represented _people_ if you could even begin to get your head around that.  In fact, they represented how many of those people would go to different emergency locations, and yet more numbers told them how much food there was per head.

Someone in London would have to okay it, of course, but in basic terms, these allocations were down to them. That was worrying.

At least, _John_ was worried.

“Never in my life,” he said for the hundredth time, rubbing his hand over his face roughly and without much care for the features beneath it.  “Bloody _figures_ …”

“Literally bloody figures,” Sherlock commented, “if we don’t get it right, which is exactly the reason why you need to keep your head.”

“Yes,” John said.  “Thanks for that.”

“It’s only the truth.” Sherlock came up behind him, tilting the screen of the laptop to suit his height and take a look.  “Panicking will get us nowhere.”

“You’re very right,” said John shortly.  “I’m very sorry – I’ll just _decide_ not to panic, shall I?”

“Do,” Sherlock shot back, deliberately missing the sarcasm.  “It’s not impossible to work through a stressful situation.”

“I did once work in the army,” John reminded him, but there was only a scoff in response to that.  “That’s not the point.  Is this the right answer, what we’ve got here?”

“How should I know?” he said unhelpfully, stepping away without putting the computer screen back at the right angle for John.  Typical.  “I’m not a politician.”

He exhaled slowly.  _One, two, three_.  “Yes, but what do you _think_?  You’re cleverer than me; you spot things…”

“I think it will be sufficient, then,” Sherlock said, apparently placated by the flattery.  This had been John’s intention.  “There.  Does that reassure you?”

“Vastly.”

“No need to be that way,” Sherlock told him as he swept to the other side of the table.  It was probably a good thing that John was interrupted by his phone’s text alert, as they were probably better off without the argument.

‘Since when have you and Sherlock been a thing?’

“Who’s that?”

“Greg,” John told him, already keying out his reply, and then remembered Sherlock might not know who that was referring to.  “Lestrade. And he's sorely misinformed.”

‘First things first – never, not, no. No thing.  Did Mycroft tell you that?  And on that note, you’re the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever texted.’

The response was speedy.  For a busy Detective Inspector, Greg never seemed to waste any time replying to his texts.  ‘You lie.  Yes, Mycroft did.’

‘No lie.  I’d tell you if we were.  And the other bit?’

‘No comment.’

‘Brat.  Just glad to see you on top of it.’

‘Not a euphemism, I hope.’

‘I don’t want to know how accurate it was.’

“What are you smiling about?” Sherlock asked, not looking up from his notes.  There was a bitter edge to his voice that John didn’t like, but he didn’t mention it.

“Just tormenting Greg about your brother.”

“Oh.” The smirk returned, as though mockery and meanness were the most acceptable reasons to smile when someone else was feeling glum.  “Well, fair enough.”

‘Sorry, mate.  Would have told you, but got told it was a matter of public security.’

‘Please tell me you don’t believe that.’

‘Of course not, but letting him think I do keeps him sweet.’

‘You’re well overdue being mercilessly teased for that.’

‘If I ever make it back to England I’ll pencil you in.  What about Sherlock, then?’

John glanced over at him now, checking for the answer first.

‘He’s fine.  Ask Mycroft to tell you the truth.’

‘He said you were sleeping together.’

‘We are sharing a bed, but that’s it.  Not a euphemism.  Long story.  Like I said – ask Mycroft.’

“I need a pen, John.”

He looked up from his phone, well-trained enough to respond to that immediately even if he held off on actually replying for a few seconds.  Better just to seem as if he wasn’t paying that much attention, he thought.  “Pen,” he said, looking around for one.  If Greg texted back within the next twenty minutes, he didn’t notice it.

 

“I’ve been worried sick about you, action man.”

She sounded less angry than the words might suggest, but John wasn’t entirely sure he believed it.  He didn’t like to go along with stereotypes if he could possibly help it, but in his experience it was definitely true that women didn’t always mean what they said, or say what they meant.  That being said, neither did men, so maybe the whole thing was nonsense.  The point was that it didn’t ring true, but he tried to ignore it.  The last thing he needed was an argument with his girlfriend now.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and it was almost the truth.  Really he hadn’t thought about it, but he was sure that if he did, he’d feel very sorry indeed for not getting in touch with her.  This assuming, of course, there were any sorry feelings left over from the ones spent on kissing Sherlock.  “It’s just been… you know.  It’s been chaos.  How’s London?”

“Busy.  Deader by the day.  It feels good to be helping, though.  I feel as though we’re making progress.”

“Are you, though?”

She sighed.  “Who’s to say?  I think so, but it could be a dead end. We just don’t know.   You’re alright, though?”

“I had a…” He struggled with how to describe it.  “An incident, I suppose.  But I’m fine.”

“John,” she said, sharp as though he was withholding crucial information – which he supposed he was.  “What happened?”

“I don’t actually know.”

“John…”

“I don’t.  I swear I don’t.  Sherlock won’t tell me.”

She paused for a moment, evidently having trouble with processing that.  John knew he would if he’d been told something similar.  After all, it sounded ridiculous when you said it aloud.  Even he could tell that.

“What do you mean, he won’t tell you?”

“I mean he won’t talk about it.  He won’t tell me what happened.  It’s mild head trauma and it aches sometimes, but it won’t even scar, they think.  That’s all I know.”

She fell silent for a few seconds longer, then finally spoke back up again in a fairly stern, monotone voice that John wasn’t sure he liked.  “Could you put him on for a minute, please?”

“Put Sherlock on?”

“No, the Pope.”

“Alright, alright,” he said, mumbling quietly.  “Stupid question.  What… what for, exactly?”

“I need to know what happened to you.  Bloody hell, John. _You_ need to know what happened to you.”

“I was planning on asking someone else,” he admitted, “though I haven’t seen anyone.  They’ve all been out, and I’ve not been cleared.”

“Hand him over, please.”

John hesitated for a moment, not even certain that Sherlock would _try_ to keep his promise about the kissing, but realised there wasn’t really much he could do to prevent this conversation without making somebody fairly annoyed.  He sighed, going over to stand by Sherlock and handing him the phone.

Sherlock looked at it for a moment.  “This is yours.”

“Yes.  Helen wants to speak to you.  About my head,” he added for clarification, as Sherlock seemed to be thinking along the same lines as he was at first.  _Not about that, no_.

“I only text,” he said, trying to hand it back, but John held up his hands and shook his head.

“Just a minute.  Just talk to her.  You can tell her that yourself if you really want to. Just give her thirty seconds or so to speak to you first.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and lifted the phone to his ear, opening with a typically blunt message.  “Yes. What?”

John did at least attempt to force himself not to listen.  Thankfully, even when he failed at that Helen’s voice was far too quiet for him to make out, so his reluctant eavesdropping was useless anyway.  It did, however, sound angry.  Whether he was making that up out of nervousness or he could actually hear it he wasn’t sure, and Sherlock’s phone face was naturally stony enough that he couldn’t judge it either way.

He tried to mouth ‘What?’ at Sherlock, but he was ignored.

“No,” Sherlock said eventually, and he started to say something else but was apparently interrupted, as he cut back in with, “No responsibility of mine.  You might like to work on your manner of speaking to people, by the way.  It’s dreadfully abrupt for a doctor.”

With that he hung up, though John was quite certain Helen wasn’t finished – she was still talking when the line disconnected and Sherlock handed the phone back to him, expression still even and calm as he turned straight back to his work.

“Was she shouting at you?” John asked after a few moments’ preparation.  “And did you just hang up on her?”

“Yes,” Sherlock said.

“To which?”

“Both.”

He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face and trying not to jump to any conclusions.  “Alright,” he said, as soon as he felt he could handle the drama of it.  For now, he ignored the vibrations of his phone in his hand.  Picking up the phone now would hardly help anybody.  “That wasn’t very nice of you.”

“Then I suppose you think it was delightful of her.”

“No,” John said evenly, trying to sound as fair as possible.  Really, he honestly _didn’t_ think Helen needed to go in all guns blazing and shout at Sherlock for withholding the information - particularly if it was something that upset him, which it certainly seemed to be.  Giving Sherlock the knowledge that he had that edge would be a bad idea, though, so John held off on telling him and instead played it down the middle.  _I love you both_.  _No - like_.  “No, I don’t.  I don’t think either of you were very nice, but she’s phoning again.  Do you want to pick up and apologise?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“No,” John repeated, sighing quietly.  “Of course you don’t.  Then, look – will you just tell me what she said?”

“She said I ought to stop treating you like a partner.”

“Oh.” The term was ambiguous, and he wasn’t sure if it was Sherlock’s or Helen’s. “Partner as in…?”

“Boyfriend was the world she used,” he said vaguely.  “Withholding information from you for your sake and the like.  I’d say friends do that too, but I suppose I’m unlikely to know.”

“No, friends do,” John assured him.  Bloody hell.  Maybe the feeling of contempt Sherlock had for Helen was suddenly entirely mutual.  God help them all – particularly John, though.  It was always worse to be in the centre.  He knew this because he was there all the bloody time when Sherlock was involved.  “Look… what else did she say?  That wasn’t all she said.  It doesn’t take thirty seconds to say that.”

“It does if you’re ranting,” Sherlock pointed out, “but alright.  She said I was making you think of me that way too.  That was her accusation.”

John gave that one a few moments before replying in the same dumbfounded way he would have anyway.  “And what does that mean, exactly?”

“It means she’s jealous, as far as I can work out.” He smirked, settling back into his seat.  “I quite like it.”

“You’re not allowed to quite like it,” John said, feeling it may well be his job to berate Sherlock about that sort of thing, even if ‘that kind of thing’ was faintly endearing in a weird sort of way.  “It’s a bad feeling.”

“So is being shouted at.”

“Please be a grown-up about this, Sherlock.”

“I was.  I hung up rather than argued back.”

John considered, and it took him only a few moments to realise exactly how much Sherlock would have wanted to insult every bit of her, and hadn’t.  It could only have been for John’s benefit that he didn’t – and really, that was nice.  Kind of.  If you squinted.

“Text her at least.  Tell her you don’t want to fight with her.”

“I don’t care either way.”

“But I do,” said John, for once content to bring out the big guns.  “So if you could do it to make my life easier I’d be much obliged.”

Sherlock gave him a hard look, fully aware what he was doing, and reached to take his phone back smoothly.  “Fine,” he said.  “Go and do something useful in the meantime.”

 

Later, John checked his sent items just out of curiosity.

‘John says to tell you I don’t want to fight.  Suppose that means _we_ don’t want to fight - John and I, that is.  Do try not to have an aneurism about that.  As a doctor I’m sure you’re aware they’re not very helpful, and I doubt John would be much impressed. –SH’

It was probably for the best that neither of them were there to see him laugh.


	21. 27th November, 2012

It had only been just over a week, but to John it felt like forever since he’d seen London and their flat.  On the bright side, it gave him longer to get over the guilt of kissing Sherlock before he had to face Helen.  He wasn’t sure he was ready to look her in the eyes yet.

“I wonder if Mrs. Hudson’s moved my skull,” Sherlock said absently one evening, calling through from the bathtub.  John had dismissed it as a method of relaxing, but apparently Sherlock was quite taken with the idea, and had taken the opportunity as soon as they had it.  He’d left the door open so that they could talk, so John heard him loud and clear as he carried on.  “I hope not.”

“Maybe we’ll find out soon.”

He heard a light splash.  Maybe Sherlock had shuffled into the water, or was washing his hair.  Something or other, anyway.  John didn’t like to think about it, for reasons he didn't care to examine.  “Yes.  I’d rather be back at Baker Street.  Progress is slow here.”

“According to Helen they might have a lead on a cure.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, bored-sounding.  “You told me.”

“Have I?”  It was hard keeping track of what they had and had not said here.  Things seemed to move in circles, particularly now that they had been allowed to go back out and help again.  Every day was just the same process in a different place, and it felt a little futile.  Apparently the camps back in London were filling up nicely now.  At least, then, there was some kind of practical benefit to it.  It just took the life and energy out of John, and he was beginning to dream of being home with a cup of tea and a weird, still-dead corpse to sniff around.

“Yes,” he repeated.  “Twice.  Presumably nothing has changed since the last time.”

“No,” John said.  “I mean, I don’t know whether it has or it hasn't.  Nothing that I’ve heard about.”

“Nothing from Mycroft and Lestrade?”

John shook his head.  “Just bits and bobs – more mates’ news than the real stuff.”

He could almost hear the frown.  “What do you mean?”

“Things like ‘had the best French beer today’.”

Sherlock snorted.  “He hasn’t really told you that.”

“Greg has,” John admitted.  “That’s just how friends talk to each other sometimes.”

“Thank goodness I’ve never had any,” Sherlock said.  It took him a moment to add, “Present company excepted.”

“Of course,” John said, not even remotely offended by it.  The first time had been rough back in Baskerville, but now that he knew Sherlock didn’t really mean it, it was difficult to get riled up about.  Well – unless you were already in a mood.  In those cases it was remarkably easy. “Tea?”

“Don’t mind if I do, actually.”

“Alright.  We’ve got… Earl Grey, lemon and ginger, peppermint and… plain old English Breakfast.”

“Earl Grey,” Sherlock said, missing off his ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.  This was another thing John was used to, though, so he barely even noticed as he set about making it.  “Are you having any?”

“Just a standard cup, yeah.”

“Come and have it in here.”

That he wasn't so used to.  “In the bath with you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock said.  “Just in the bathroom.”

“Sorry,” John said, slightly bemused as he waited for the kettle to brew.  “Wouldn’t want to be silly, now, would I?.”

“I think you’re implying something,” Sherlock said in an accusatory tone.  It was the kind of thing he’d only recently started saying, filling in the gaps where once he might have remained quiet.  It was interesting, really. The fact that he’d been silent so much used to make John think he was very different to other people, but now that he knew what Sherlock had been thinking in those spaces, he really didn’t seem so very different at all.  He joked, and he worried, and he was sarcastic.  He was going for something more warm now, leaning over the edge of the bath.  “It isn’t silly.  Come and sit in here.”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s not an attempt to seduce you,” Sherlock said, as easily as if he was talking about the temperature of the water.  “Just come here.  I’m tired of calling through.”

“Then you have something you want to talk about?”

“No.  Will you just come and sit?”

This sounded a lot like a direct order to John, so he decided simply to sigh and obey.  Sherlock got difficult when he heard the word ‘no’ too often, or had it implied in his direction, and they’d been getting on well this evening.  He didn’t want to spoil it with an argument now.  “Alright, then.  If you insist.”

As if proving he could still be a little bit bizarre when he wanted, Sherlock didn’t reply now.  He sank back into the bath to wait – at least, that’s what it sounded like – and let John get on with brewing the tea.

He took his time with the tea, actually, for reasons best known to himself.  All he knew was that the tea he carried in to Sherlock was very strong, very well-stirred and with very carefully poured water.  “Earl Grey,” he announced, looking at the cup rather than Sherlock as he handed it over.  Presumably the bathwater and the bubbles were protecting his modesty, but John didn't fancy checking to make sure.  “Taste okay?”

“Fine,” Sherlock said before he’d sipped it, and then answered again after he had.  “Yes.  Good.”

“No problem,” John said, disregarding the fact that there was no ‘thank you’ to respond to.  It was there in Sherlock’s head, he was sure; Sherlock respected him and appreciated the tea he’d brought.  He just hadn’t thought to say it aloud.  “Company, then.”

“Company,” Sherlock said.  “Provide it.”

John snorted, sitting down on the closed lid of the toilet to drink his tea.  Not particularly comfortable or classy, he supposed, but it’d do.  He’d relaxed in far worse places.  There was that poem about cats that John’s mother always used to quote. _Cats sleep anywhere_.  John liked to think the same applied to ex-army types.  “Yes, sir.”

“Good man, soldier,” Sherlock said, closing his eyes and sinking down more into the water.  He did look perfectly content – hadn’t even spoken particularly forcefully, though the phrase kind of lent itself to roughness.  “I don’t feel we’ve had much time to talk about unimportant things recently.  That’s all.”

“And obviously the bath is the best place to do that.”

“With tea,” Sherlock pointed out.  “Yes.  I would have suggested bed, but you’d have complained it was too intimate.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” John said, knowing full well that he would.  “You’re fancying home again, then?”

Sherlock nodded, eyes still closed as he brought his cup to his lips.  John thought he saw him bump his teeth slightly with the rim, which had to be a little painful, but then realised he hadn’t intended to look and turned his head in the other direction.  “London is where I belong, I think.”

“Nowhere else you could live?”

“Certainly not here,” Sherlock said.  “Perhaps Toronto.  New York.  Bath - the city, not this - is fine, but it’s too quiet.”

“Need a good murder quota, don’t you?”

“Exactly.”

“You should try Midsomer.”

Sherlock cracked open an eye to look at him, missing the reference.  “What?”

“Never mind.”

“No, what?”

John grinned slightly, amused as ever by his lack of knowledge.  _You do need me as a doctor_ , he thought, _but you need me as a person more_.  “It’s a TV show, Sherlock.  A stupid mystery thing. You’d hate it, actually - Midsomer Murders.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said.  “Maybe we should watch it.”

“I just told you you’d hate it.”

“Yes,” he said, “but I like criticising things.”

You had to admire his honesty, really.  Ordinary people would dance around saying something like that.  Not so Sherlock Holmes.  John’s grin stayed fixed on his face, and not for the first time in the past few years he realised how much he actually enjoyed being friends with Sherlock.  It wasn’t just the cases and the excitement, though that helped.  They were actually compatible as people, too – on every level and on every occasion, even if they disagreed on some points.

“Alright.  We can sit you down and let you criticise it.”

“Good,” Sherlock said, shooting a smile back.  John considered toning down his smile given the sincere and deep way Sherlock’s looked, but it was an impossible task.  All he could hope was that Sherlock’s expression was as platonic as his was, even if it wasn’t likely.  “And what else, when we get home?”

“Takeaways,” said John.  “Chinese.  Pizza.  Christ – if they’re still open.”

Sherlock pulled a face.  “London hasn’t ground to a halt, John.  Surely there are still people too lazy to cook their own food on the evenings.”

“Who craves a takeaway enough to call out a delivery person in the dark these days, though?” John asked, then reconsidered as he saw Sherlock open his mouth.  “Actually, no.  Don’t answer that.”

“It’s a service they choose to provide.”

“Though presumably not when there’s a risk of delivering _themselves_ as an evening meal.”

Sherlock smirked, picking up his tea again to take another mouthful.  He drank it so slowly that it often got cold before he’d had more than a third of it, but today it seemed to be going down at a decent pace.  Maybe he preferred it this strong.  “I know it isn’t funny.  It’s just the perfect marriage of traditional horror and pornography.”

John snorted, though he did spent a moment wondering how Sherlock knew about typical porn scenario tropes.  That being said, how the hell did Sherlock know about typical _horror_ tropes?  He didn’t seem the type.  Then again, neither did Molly Hooper.  “Poor delivery boys.”

“We can give them a good tip,” Sherlock suggested.

“What, such as ‘don’t go out with the zombies’?” John said, inspiring a deliciously girlish laugh from his friend.  Every now and again he said something just funny enough to get that kind of sound out of Sherlock, and it felt like a real victory every time.  “Or ‘calm down, arm up’.  Wasn’t that Mycroft’s advice?”

“Stupid.”

“Yeah, I know.  Took them long enough, as well.”

“It’s all paperwork and pacing around,” Sherlock said.  “Getting people to _agree_ on things.  Fixing the layout of the posters.”

“I’d accuse them of being afraid to make a mistake,” John said, “but you’re pretty much the same, aren’t you?”

“There’s a difference between mistaking a clue at a murder scene and choosing whether to use Helvetica or Constantia.”

“Which would be the mistake there, then?”

“Constantia,” said Sherlock.  “Obviously.”

John laughed, sipping down the rest of his tea.  He was a fast drinker – another relic from the army.  Now that he’d settled in here, though he didn’t think talking in the bathroom was so bad, so he saw no rush to get out.  Instead he just deposited his cup on the counter, keeping quiet as he waited for Sherlock to speak.

“Do you think she’s right?”

John shook his head, confused.  “You're going to have to elaborate.”

“Helen.  Is she right?”

“About what, Sherlock?”

“Do you think you see me as a boyfriend, of sorts?”

John fell quiet with a light exhale, unsure how to deal with this kind of question.  He didn’t want to hurt him.  As much as that must have happened over the past few weeks, he really, really didn’t – and that was hard, really, because he didn’t want to mollycoddle either.  Sherlock didn’t need to feel like he was being pitied, after all.  Wouldn’t that be worse?

“I don’t think so,” he admitted, finally deciding that honesty was best.  It felt more certain than it actually came out, though – not that he noticed.  “No.  I think we’re just… we’re very close, me and you.  Friends aren’t usually this close.  I think people just don’t understand it the right way.”

“The right way?” Sherlock said, raising an eyebrow.  No. Stupid wording. Stupid.

“No,” John said, correcting himself immediately.  “I didn't mean it like that.  It wouldn’t be the wrong way if we… you know.  I just meant that people don't see it the way it is.  I think it’s easier for them to understand if they see it as a romantic thing, but…” He cleared his throat.  “Not for me it’s not, no.  You know that.”

“But you don’t think you’d be exactly the same with me if we were lovers?” He wafted a hand.  “Physical intimacy aside.”

“Well.” John thought about it, feeling a duty to at least consider the idea, even if it sounded silly at his first approach.  Was it that silly, though?  After he mused over it a bit, he shook his head.  “Alright.  Maybe it wouldn’t be that different.  Maybe we’d just be closer, but that doesn’t mean anything, does it?  Not really.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

John sighed, looking down at his lap.  “We’ll have to find you a boyfriend, Sherlock.  Or a girlfriend. Whatever you fancy.”

“You know what I fancy.”

“Other than that.”

“Then I don’t want one.”

“You’d feel better for it.”

“No,” Sherlock insisted, very firm in his tone of voice and his gaze.  “No, I wouldn’t.”

“You don’t know that, Sherlock.”

“Alright, then,” Sherlock said.  “If Helen had said ‘no’, would you be happy for her to send you on a date with another of the doctors instead, to make up for it?”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same.”

“How is it even remotely similar?”

Sherlock gave him a particularly frosty look, then turned back to stare at the wall instead.  “You’re right.  It isn’t similar; it’s worse.  You and I are friends.  You ought to be above that sort of hurtful suggestion.”

To be told openly by Sherlock he was hurting him surely meant that it had gotten pretty bad, and he hated that.  John nodded, looking down at the floor out of shame.  It felt like he was trying to help, but he tried to just trust what Sherlock was saying this time.  If he was hurt then he was hurt, and John had to try and fix the way he was acting to help it.  “Alright,” he said.  “Sorry.  I just thought it might…”

“Might what, John?”

“Well.  Distract you, or… You know.  I’m not the only person in the world.”

“Only person I can stand to talk to,” Sherlock pointed out, tone grumpy.

“If only because I’m the only person you _try_ to talk to.”

Sherlock grumped, sitting up and leaning over the side of the bath.  “We ought to discuss something, John.”

That surprised him, actually.  It was unusually frank for Sherlock.  “Alright.  Go on.”

“There’s a reason Mycroft thought you reciprocated, and why Greg believed him so easily, and why other people always ask if we're together.  Of course there’s a reason.”

“People just see men together and assume,” John said, but Sherlock was shaking his head.

“No.  They know.  I don’t talk to people the way I talk to you.  I don’t make friends.  I don’t like to.  The fact that you were an exception, even suitable enough to take around everywhere, was enough for them to notice what you were to me.  And as for you…”

“Mm?” he prompted, not wanting to interrupt.

“You can’t really imagine that people are frequently able to tolerate me like you do, unless there's something more to it.”

“I don’t know that that’s any reason to suspect we’re together, Sherlock.”

He shook his head, shuffling back underwater and dipping down to submerse his shoulders.  It must be cold for him in here. The water was hot still, but the air was mild around them.  “Perhaps they wanted to.  Besides, as you said - we’re intimate.”

“Not intimate like that.”

“Not to you, in any case.”

“It does take two consenting opinions for this kind of thing to work, Sherlock.”  He sensed from the silence that he’d been somewhat harsh, so he tried again.  “Look, I’m sorry.  I understand what you’re saying.  I like being your friend.  It’s really great, actually - you know, to… have someone that close to you.  I know you better than anybody.  It’s just not-”

“Not _like that_ ,” Sherlock snipped back.  “I know.  I know.”

“I wish it was, though,” John said.  “I honestly do.”

“If you say that again I’ll be annoyed.”

John fell quiet, trying to think what else he could say.  It wasn’t the kind of situation he was used to, and he didn’t like that either.  If only there was a normal experience he could draw on and adapt it for use with Sherlock it'd be better, but he didn’t even have that.  He was flying completely blind.  “Sorry.”

“I know,” Sherlock said, relenting slightly.  “Just stop saying it.”

“Let’s talk about something else, then.”

“Reanimated corpses?” Sherlock suggested.

“Well, there can never be too many conversations about them, can there?”

 

“Home?”

Ellen bowed her head.  “Yes.  There are only a few dregs left, and we can manage to do that ourselves.  They’re going to need you more on the London end to help get people into the camps, and I’m sure you’re not enjoying seeing Norwich like this.”

He could tell Sherlock was about to say that he didn’t care, so John cut in again.  “Well.  If you’re sure we can’t help you, then we can do that.  We’ll just have to clear it with the people in charge, and then we can be out of your hair.”

“We do appreciate your help,” she said, as though there were very few things she’d less like to say.  “It’s not that we couldn’t have run it ourselves.  We could have, but... all hands on deck, you know?  It was good of you to give it your 110%.  It’s not your home, and you still risked yourselves.”

John nodded.  “It’s fine.  It’s… you know.  That’s what it’s all about.  Helping each other.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes.  “I’m going to pack.”

 Evidently, though, Ellen understood that the sentiment was sincere, and nodded back.  “Absolutely.  We’ll be seeing you again in London, then.”

“Definitely.  Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

She was about to turn away when John suddenly realised that this was his opportunity, and grabbed it with both hands.  “Wait!”  Only now did he realise how stupid that had sounded, and how urgent; he smiled sheepishly as she did so with a confused expression.  “Sorry, Ellen.  Just… ah.  My head injury.”

“If you’re after compensation, then good luck.”

“No!  No, not at all.  I just… suppose I just want to know how it actually happened.”

She gave him a hard look, clearly unimpressed at the idea this was a joke.  “I have much better things to be doing with my time than some kind of garbled attempt at getting a pity shag or some kind of hero worship…”

“Honestly,” John said, feeling stupid, “I just really don’t know how it happened.  I can’t remember, and Sherlock won’t tell me.”

She shook her head, looking in the other direction to try and calm down before she looked back.  “You’re a good man, John,” she said, “but to be frank, I think you’re an idiot for hanging around with that tosser.  They tell me you’re supposed to be best friends.”

“That’s right.”

“Get out of that,” she said, voice kind of rough.  “He’s intolerable.  You’re practically cutting off a limb just having him near you… but if you really want to know what happened, and you really mean that he won’t tell you, then alright.”

“Yes,” John said, hoping that answered both.  “Please.”

Ellen took a deep breath, maybe trying to work out how to being before she launched into it.  “Alright.  You’ll remember where it started.  We were in the uni students' halls. There were tons of _them_ around but we didn’t know whether there were any kids still in there, so we had no choice but to sweep.  We blocked the door and waited for them to come.  We were backed into a corner at this point, and everyone was ready to fight, but it just…” She shook her head.  “It just went wrong.  We couldn’t handle the volume.  One of them got to you, and you fought it, but… fuck, they were strong.  Lots of food, lots of energy.  It knocked you down hard on the ground.  Nearly got to you, too.”

He shook his head.  “No, but Sherlock was… You know.  He seemed like it was the worst thing that had ever happened.  Surely it’s not just…?”

“He let you out of his sight, I think,” she said, as though not in the least bit interested.  She probably wasn’t, and why should she be?  “He kept saying something about letting you out of his sight.  Bloody condescending if you ask me, but there it is.”

He nodded, absorbing the information slowly and then looking back to her.  “Okay.  Well.  Thanks.  I needed to know that.”

“I mean it, you know,” she said.  “You and him.  Don’t.”

“He’s my friend,” he said.  “I know he’s not conventional, but…”

“He’s rude,” she interrupted.  Ironic, really.  “He’s arrogant and offensive.  He’s brilliant up top, but not brilliant enough to excuse all that.  Just don’t get tarred with the same brush.  Do you understand?”

“John,” Sherlock called.  “London agrees.  We’re getting the next train out.  Come on.”

She gave him a look, as if this was exactly what she was talking about, and started heading off.  “Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” John told her.  “All of you.”

He wondered if she’d die before he saw her again, and then tried to cast the thought away.  No.  You couldn’t think like that, or it’d drive you mad.  Completely and utterly mad.


	22. 28th November, 2012

London wasn’t as orderly as they’d left it, and though they knew it wasn’t connected it still felt like it had done it deliberately the moment they’d turned their backs.  It was beginning to resemble Norwich when they’d first arrived there, which was worrying.  Even Sherlock’s brow furrowed at the sight of all the litter in the streets, building up much more than usual.

“I don’t like it,” John said, if only to try and wheedle a similar confession out of Sherlock.  “I don’t like it at all.”

“Fixable,” Sherlock said, but with far less conviction than he’d said it about Norwich.

Mrs. Hudson was waiting for them when they arrived at home.  She seemed surprised when John hugged her before getting the tea she had prepared, but it was a happy sort of surprise.  “It has been a bit too quiet without all the violin noises and little explosions,” she admitted.  “It’s nice to have you both back.”

“It's good to be back,” Sherlock told her, preferring to wrap an arm around her and squeeze gently than give her a proper hug.  Well, the sentiment was there.  “What have we missed, then?  What’s changed for day-to-day London?”

“Let's see,” she said, sitting down beside John on the sofa, “not much, really.  Not officially.  But you don’t get people coming door-to-door so much, and of course there haven’t been any tourists.  It sounds awful, really, but it’s much nicer walking down to the shops without them.”

“I thought you were ordering the shopping online and getting it delivered,” John prompted, slightly concerned that she’d deviated from the agreement on that.  They had been determined to keep her safe even if they weren’t there to help her out.

“Well, that’s the thing, dear,” she said.  “They stopped delivering last week.”

“Oh, right.  Bloody hell.”  It seemed wrong to stop sending out deliveries in a big safe van and force people to leave their homes, perhaps vulnerable and alone, but that was Tesco for you.  They probably didn’t want to be sued if one of their employees did something stupid.  “What’s the official word, then?”

“ITV and Channel Four have been reporting that it’s spread to France, but not a whiff of it on the BBC,” she said, “so I’m not sure if I believe it.”

“A mite unfortunate when supposedly the most trustworthy source in the country officially becomes the _least_ trustworthy,” said Sherlock.  This was the edited version of what he thought for Mrs. Hudson’s sake – she’d been trusting the BBC for years, whereas Sherlock thought it was useless.  This wasn’t to say he thought much of any of the news channels, of course.  “It is in France,” he told her.  “Mycroft’s gone to take care of it.”

“Mycroft?” she said.  “He was here yesterday.  He brought me some lovely seasoned bread and some fruit.”

John and Sherlock exchanged glances.  “Well, that was kind of him,” John ventured after a while.

“Yes,” she said.  “Very kind.  He seemed in a very good mood for saying all this is happening.  He’d even brought me tangerines, just because they're my favourites; he said he can’t stand the smell.”

“Tangerines don’t smell,” Sherlock said forcefully.  John got the distinct impression this was a dislike that the Holmes brothers had discussed before.  “Even so… yes.  It was kind.”

“You’ll have to say thank you for me,” she said.  “I told him at the time, of course, but even so.”

“Well, presumably we’ll be seeing him if he’s back in London,” John said, glancing at Sherlock.  Why hadn’t he contacted them to say so?  It seemed bizarre.  “He’ll probably be at the emergency camps too at some point.”

“Not if he can help it,” said Sherlock.  “It’ll hardly be much like… what do they call it?  Glamping.”

John grinned, always amused to hear Sherlock mention that sort of thing.  It was mainly a reaction born out of surprise.  Who’d have thought Sherlock Holmes would know about the trend for glamorous camping holidays?  “Maybe.  Surely he’ll want to see it’s working alright?”

“What are reports for?” Sherlock said.  “Perhaps he’ll go if Lestrade tells him to.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Hudson remembered.  “He told me the lovely news.”

“I don’t know about _lovely_ ,” said Sherlock.

“Oh, Sherlock,” she said, mildly berating him.  “Don’t be so awful.  It’s what we’ve all been waiting for.”

“Was it really only me that didn’t see it?” John said, dumfounded that even Mrs. Hudson had noticed.  She didn’t even see them that often, and couldn’t have met Lestrade more than a handful of times to begin with.

“I think so,” she said, giving his shoulder a light pat.  “That’s just the way these things work sometimes, I suppose.  Well, I’ve started moving your things for you anyway.”

John fell silent, and Sherlock turned his head to look at her too.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “Shouldn’t I have?  I assumed it’d be Sherlock’s room you’d take. It’s much nicer, if you ignore that silly poster of the periodic table.”

“It isn’t silly,” Sherlock said, but John’s reaction was predictably less focused on that detail.

“Mrs. Hudson,” he said.  “What news are you talking about?”

“You and Sherlock, of course,” she said, standing up with a bit of effort.  It had probably been an early start for her today. She did get a bit overeager on days she was expecting guests, and apparently that included her tenants coming home.  “It was wonderful to hear.  I did think it the first time I saw you together, but it can take a while for these things to come out sometimes, can’t it?”

“No,” John corrected, slow and hesitant for fear of saying something cruel.  “No, that’s – we’re not together, Mrs. Hudson.  Is that what Mycroft told you?”

“He said you were sharing a hotel room and everything,” she said.  “Isn’t it true?”

“Well, we were,” John said, “but-”

“You mustn’t tell me you were just sharing the room without committing to anything,” she said, fairly stern.  “I don’t mind if you’re not married - that's not your fault anyway - but there’s always something to be said for keeping it between people who care about each other.”

“No,” John said immediately, even faster than before.  “No, no, no.  Not like that.  No.”

“We didn’t have sex,” Sherlock supplied lazily, sipping his tea.  He seemed completely unflustered by the mistake, but then he would be, wouldn’t he?

“Well, then, what did Mycroft tell me?”

“A lie,” John said.  “He was just… causing trouble.  I’m sorry, Mrs. Hudson; it was very kind of you to start moving things.”

“Oh, dear,” she said.  “It’s alright.  I’m sorry.  I must have misunderstood.”

“I’m sure it’s what he wanted you to think,” said John, going back to his tea to relax again.  Bloody Mycroft.  “It’s certainly what he wants _me_ to think.”

“Is he trying to play matchmaker?” she asked.  “I think that’s a nice idea too.  You always have so many girlfriends around, you know.  I always wondered if you might have been overcompensating.”

He was too tired to get flustered about that now.  There had already been too much of that today.  “No,” was all he said.  “Not at all.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I think you’re very well-suited to each other.”

“Exactly.”

“See,” she said, heading to the door and nodding in Sherlock’s direction.  “He thinks so too, and he’s not often wrong, is he?”

“No,” John said.  He wondered how long it’d take him to give in just for the sake of shutting everybody up, and then felt terribly guilty about it.  “Not often.”

 

They spent the morning getting packed away and moving John’s things back into his own room, but then it was out to work again at the emergency camps.  They should have been a depressing sight, really, with all the displaced families gathering in one place, but actually John found it all quite inspiring.  He knew it was just propaganda that they were a particularly ‘make do and mend’ nation, but it was nice to see that effort and dedication to just carrying on in person.  Everybody was helping everybody else, and there was already some kind of system that didn’t cause too much chaos for distributing food.  It nearly got him a little bit emotional, actually. He’d always been quite a patriot, and it stroked that corner of his psyche.

Sherlock, on the other hand, simply saw it as a system to be improved.  “We need to start showing people how to construct a basic shower system in their own areas to cut down on the bathroom queues and put a similar procedure in place there as they have with the mealtimes.  It needs to be staggered – and separating by gender is causing problems.  People ought to sign up as groups to be put in single-person cubicles next to one another.  They’ll have five-minute slots and then they’re out.  Showers would be best fixed at once every two days, unless they’re willing to queue for a spare spot.”

“You’re not even the least bit impressed at what they’ve got so far?”

“Any crowd of idiots could set up what they’ve got so far,” Sherlock said.  “ _Obviously_.  And they’re making a mess of the Tower while they’re doing it.  The Hyde Park lot are presumably just as bad.”

“The Hyde Park lot are in much more danger, being in the open.  They’ve got to set up security first. That’s their priority.”

“Then it’ll be worse, unless there are some decent-minded people in charge there.”

“Why don’t we just test the IQ of everybody who wants a place in these camps and turn them away if it’s less than 115?”

Sherlock kept his mouth shut, which was a deeply worrying response to a joke like that, all things considered.

“You must be Mr. Holmes and Doctor Watson,” came the voice of a slightly unkempt-looking man coming towards them from across the courtyard.  “Is that right?  I’m Doctor Ian Groves.  I run the medical tents here.  We’re very glad to have your help.”

“Glad to be here,” John said, shaking his proffered hand.  “I’m Doctor Watson – but please, just John – and this is Sherlock.”

“Then thank you, John,” he said, and offered that hand to Sherlock now, who just looked at it.  “And welcome, Sherlock.”

“I have ideas for your washroom system,” was Sherlock’s greeting.  “Who do I need to speak to in order to have them put in place?”

Ian seemed perplexed by the bluntness, but apparently wasn’t the type to argue back.  “That’d be Sally Adeoye. That’s her by the wash tents, in the red shirt.  Red shirts are organisers, unless that’s all the civilians have to wear…” Of course, Sherlock had already gone, and John was left behind to smile sheepishly.

“He’s very…”

“Yes,” Ian said.  “They did warn me.  It’s still a bit…”

“Yeah,” John said, saving him the attempt at describing it politely.  There wasn’t really a polite way to tell someone their friend had bloody horrendous manners.  “I’m sorry.  I’m much less difficult, though, so if there’s anywhere in particular you need me…?”

“Actually,” he said, “we’re just working on setting up the chaplaincy system so that we can get some services running for people of faith, if…?”

“Absolutely,” said John.  “I can help with that.”

Ian smiled, evidently pleased to hear it.  “I was told that your friend might not like it to be mentioned in front of him. I wasn’t sure of your stance.”  He paused for a moment, then added, “Not that you ought to tell me if you don’t want to.  Of course it’s personal.  I just meant…”

“I understand,” John said, “and it’s fine, really.  I mean... I’m a Christian.  Not a churchgoer, but I think there’s a lot to be said for it.  He’s… no.  Not so much.”

“A couple of our helpers here aren’t religious,” Ian said, “but I do think it’s perhaps easier for a person of faith to understand.”

“Sherlock wouldn’t even try,” John admitted.  “He has some strong opinions.”

“Yes,” Ian said, grinning slightly.  “I can imagine.  He seems the type.  Maybe he’ll find God eventually.”

“I doubt it,” John said, “but I hope he can be forgiven.  He’s blunt and he isn’t easy sometimes, but he is genuinely good.”

“You think?”

John shook his head.  “I know.  I know he’s good.  He means well.  He tries.”

“Well, you know.  Different people believe different things, but I think that’s what counts.  Intentions, helpful actions…”

Anybody who understood that about Sherlock with no questions asked was automatically a friend of John’s.  He sent a warm smile over and decided quickly, perhaps foolishly quickly, to trust him.  “That’s how I see it, too.”

“I think it’s important,” he said, “as a doctor.  Respecting lots of different kinds of people for being good in different ways – with or without giving thanks to God.”

More devout than John, then, by the way he talked, but John didn’t necessarily mind that.  It made a change from being around Sherlock and Mycroft, who both seemed to treat his faith like something of a fairy tale.  Logic didn’t have to apply to everything, surely.  “You could be right, there.”

“Whatever’s right,” he said, “I’d like to get these things set up fast.  People are frightened, and it’d be nice to give them a calm place.”

“Multi-faith, I’m assuming.  A communal area, or separate spaces?”

“I hadn’t decided,” he said.  “What do you think?”

John shook his head, considering.  “It’s a frantic time.  I don’t like to be cynical, but for the sake of preventing, ah… _disagreements_ …”

“It might be worth setting up cubicles for private worship.  Unspecified.”

He nodded, slowly and then more certain.  “Yes.  Yes - I like that.  Not even religious, necessarily. Maybe if people just need a place to think.”

“If people can’t think on their own, then they ought not to be allowed at all.”  Sherlock had apparently caught up with them, moving immediately to John’s side rather than Ian’s, as was probably predictable.  “What are you working on?”

“Nothing you’d be interested in,” John assured him, feeling it was best to warn him of it first even if he knew it was a sure-fire way of forcing him to ask.

“What?”

Ian was content to step in, even and warm as ever.  “We’re trying to organise an area for people to practice their faiths.  Difficult times call for support and comfort, don’t you think?”

“No,” said Sherlock.  “John, we have better things to do.  Come on.”

It had been a long time since he’d decided not to go with Sherlock, but it had to happen sometime.  “No; I quite like the idea of helping Ian with this.”

“We have permission to set up the bathroom procedures,” Sherlock said, as though this changed everything.

“You can, if you like.  I’m going to do this.”

Sherlock gave him an uncertain look, maybe trying to decide if he’d done something worthy of reprimand, and appeared to be unable to decide.  “You won’t come with me.”

“No,” John said patiently.  “I said I’d help Ian, and I intend to.  That’s the last time I’ll say it, and you’re very welcome to stay and help too, or I’ll see you at dinner.”

He pursed his lips, deciding, and then shook his head.  “Dinner, then.  Do try not to be condemned by this God of yours for cutting the hair at your temples or eating shellfish and the like.”

John let him go without comment, shooting an amused smile in Ian’s direction.

“Charmer,” Ian said.  John’s grin widened, and apparently it inspired another chain of thought.  “You two.  Are you…?”

“No,” John assured him.  Maybe he should just have it tattooed on his forehead.  “Not.”

“Oh.” He led him over towards the right area, clearly surprised to be wrong.  “You seem that way.  Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” John said.  “Loads of people assume.  I’ve got a girlfriend, actually.”

“You have?”

John caught the vague scent of disappointment, and it threw him off completely.  He’d always felt fairly successful with women, and seemed to be fairly good in terms of boyfriend material. The thought that he might have been having the same effect on men without noticing all this time was quite a bizarre one.  It was flattering, of course, but it felt strange.  Had it really been that way all along, and it had taken him until now to realise?

“Yeah,” he said, not sure how to approach his response now.  This was weird – particularly because he wasn’t entirely opposed to the thought as it formed itself in his head.

Of course, Ian wasn’t an option.  He couldn’t be, realistically.  If he was going to be attracted to a man, it’d have to be Sherlock.

“How about you?” was what he settled on, feeling that was safe to ask.  “Are you attached?”

“Trying to be,” he admitted, giving him a light smile.  “I’m not asking for much.  Just a nice, Christian soul to spend however long we have left with.”

“This kind of thing really gets you thinking about what you want.”

Ian nodded, not at all embarrassed by what he’d found he wanted.  “It does.  The thought that it could all be over so quickly, like it has been for so many people…”

“It’s scary.”

“Terrifying,” he said.  “For me, I believe it’s all part of the plan, but… that doesn’t mean I’m not nervous to see how it plays out.  Doesn’t mean I’m enjoying the idea of doing it alone.”

This should be a fairly awkward conversation to have with someone you’d just met, John realised, but this just wasn’t.  He didn’t feel in the least bit uncomfortable.  “I know what you’re saying,” he said.  “I get it – but it’ll happen for you.  You know that, right?”

“I hope so,” he said.  “Though I suppose you don’t need me to tell you that’s a big claim to make for a person I’ve just met.”

John bowed his head.  “Yeah, I’ll grant you that, but… I’m good with people, I like to think.  You’re alright.  You’re the kind of person people just… like.”

“Even you?”

John gave him a sheepish grin.  “Warmed right up to you, haven’t I?”

He could have sworn Ian blushed a bit as they stepped into the tent, but tried not to look too hard.  There were very few things that could make his love life more complicated at the minute, but this was one of them, and John was determined to avoid it if he could.

 _If_.


End file.
